Finder freezes when samba automount not found

I've added automount entries to my wife's Macbook (OSX - unsure about the exact version as she's overseas) for some shares on our FreeNAS server at home.

Sometimes when she travels for work it can't find the shares so Finder gets stuck with the spinning beach ball and is unusable. This doesn't always happen but when it does, it is persistent. For her current issue I have commented out the automount entries with chrome remote desktop however this is not always an option due to intermittent internet.

Is there some way to change these settings so that this problem does not reoccur? It does not happen every time.

The entries are fairly basic, as below.

/etc/auto_master

/- auto_smb -nosuid

/etc/auto_smb

/Volumes/share1 -fstype=smbfs,sort ://user:[email protected]/share1
/Volumes/share2 -fstype=smbfs,sort ://user:[email protected]/share2

Solution 1:

This is one of the things I wish Apple either handled better or displayed a network blocking indication so users can know when things are being help up.

This is an issue even on the 10.11 beta builds. It is an issue with Apple network mounts, SMB mounts and other network interactions. Finder just blocks for network resolution by design.

If you can submit a reproducible situation where you can measure the delay to Apple - that might help them code in some more performance into Finder. I have filed about 5 bug reports at https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/ and it's not clear they are going to redesign anything from what I can tell.

Perhaps if enough people submit reproducible issues (mine are all slow downs and not complete blocks) with sysdiagnose showing the block then this might get addressed as a bug in the design.