So, I have always used my IBM/Lenovo X61S laptop with Windows XP + MobaXterm/Professional to access a remote Linux machine running kernel 2.6.39.
This machine is for legacy reasons since I have legacy applications (compilers, and applications) that run better this way or don't run on Windows 7..10.
Anyway, I needed to update the userland, and this required to update the kernel, so now I am on Linux 4.9.16, and I am experimenting a weird problem with CIFS.
The Windows laptop "exports" a part of its filesystem to the Linux machine via CIFS, and ... the problem is that it hangs up if I don't continuously keep it busy.
This is the error I see on Linux when the CIFS filesystem hands up
CIFS VFS: Server 192.168.1.12 has not responded in 120 seconds. Reconnecting...
And there is no way to sort it out. I have to unmount, and remount it.
This is how it's mounted
# cat /etc/fstab | grep idp
//192.168.1.12/idp.do /idp.do cifs noauto,nobrl,noserverino,rw,iocharset=utf8,credentials=/etc/cifspasswd,vers=1.0 0 0
# mount | grep idp
//192.168.1.12/idp.do on /idp.do type cifs (rw,relatime,vers=1.0,cache=strict,username=root,domain=IDP,uid=0,noforceuid,gid=0,noforcegid,addr=192.168.1.12,file_mode=0755,dir_mode=0755,nounix,mapposix,nobrl,rsize=61440,wsize=65536,echo_interval=60,actimeo=1)
And this script is how I save my day, but it's crazy that I have to do something like that!
while [ 1 ]
do
#clear
#echo "sync"
#df
sync
sync
sync
sync
ls /idp.do/ > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
sleep 1
done
"ls /idp.do" is repeated every second and this keeps the comunication between the laptop and the remote Linux machine alive.