I have a SMB network mount in /etc/fstab, which is supposed to be mounted at boot time. This fails most of the the time with errors like these: CIFS VFS: No response for cmd 114 mid 1 CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -112 I am fairly certain this is being caused by /etc/fstab being processed when the network isn't up yet, because mounting the share manually afterwards always works. The regular mount command has the _netdev mount option, which tells mount to hold on until the network has become available. IMHO it would be a good thing if mount.cifs grew this option too.
Actually... /bin/mount doesn't do anything with _netdev, it's ignored. That's intended for use by init scripts (at least according to Karel Zak, the util-linux-ng maintainer). Current versions of mount.cifs and the kernel also ignore it.