Force umount of stale NFS shares

Whenever my NFSv4 server becomes unreachable a little window pops up offering me to disconnect the affected shares.

It looks like this:

If I choose to Ignore iTunes becomes unresponsive because of the playlists that point to MP3 files located on those NFS shares that have become unreachable. I can force quit iTunes but it can never be started again. Its status becomes Not Responding, the icon jumps for a while in the dock and that's all that happens.

So, sometimes it makes sense to Ignore those stale connections to NFS shares because I know the NFS server will become available soon, but other times this ruins everything for me and I effectively cannot use iTunes until connection with the NFS server is established again. Which can "resume" an application from a freezed state immediately, btw.

My question is, can I make that little pop-up window show itself on demand somehow (run a command in Terminal, hot key, etc.) or run a terminal command to forcibly disconnect stale NFS mounts?

OS X 10.8.2, iTunes 11.0 and NFSv4 server on Arch Linux

Solution 1:

rWhen you kill iTunes, do you kill iTunes Helper too?:

$ ps -cef | grep iTunes
1001  7878   243   0  8:30AM ??         0:05.38 iTunes
1001  7882   243   0  8:31AM ??         0:00.03 iTunesHelper

If you can't kill iTunesHelper also, you will need to add "intr" to the mount options. Having done that, you should be able to stop processes waiting on IO from the unavailable filesystem. Once you can get rid of processes using the filesystem, you should be able to umount it.