I frequently mount directories with samba shares with my samba client. When the share isn't available anymore even for a split second my system basically crashes and I have to restart all services and sometimes reboot. I think that if a network share goes down and comes back up the client should be able to reconnect and remount the share without crashing.
If this is the linux CIFS client, then you ned to contact Steve French on the linux-cifs-client@samba.org mailing list. If this is smbfs, we're not maintaining that currently.
if you mount -t cifs //server/share /mnt ... then crash the server (killall smbd or net session \\clientipaddress /delete) the Linux cifs client will reconnect: a) the tcp session b) the smb session running over the tcp session c) the "tree connection" (mount to share) over the smb session d) the open files on the mount e) (and even rewrite cached data in many cases - as long as the application has not mmapped and page faulted on the dead server) It will not replay byte range lock requests (yet) The legacy smbfs client mount -t smbfs //server/share /mnt .... tries to reconnect and often does reconnect the tcp and smb sessions and tree connection (mount) but does not do a very good job on the rest. smbfs is not supported as development has moved to its replacement There are other samba client tools of course ... in particular "smbclient //server/share" which has an ftp like interface. I don't remember whether it supports reconnection or not. That tool and the cifs vfs mentioned at the time are supported