Although this debian bug 461048 thread reports the bug as non-reproducible, I had the failure to umount error:



More here, from whirlpool.net: forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/928142.html
and from fedora: forums.fedoraforum.org/archive/index.php/t-96243.html

Sure enough, all the issues reported in that bug report thread were present, and more. In my case, I just removed the data from /etc/mtab, which is a hack, but at least umount works again.

I also saw other strangenesses with samba cifs mounts, including multiple mounts on the same directory being permitted, and I fixed those by running umount directory-name multiple times.

I suspect the causes in my case were because of the initial testing and debugging I did, which included a lot of ctrl+c exits from rsyncs of the directories, and forced exits of umount step of scripting.

But I'll watch this and report to that bug thread if the issues persist.

However, if your issue is simply that the file system is actually umounted, as a check of its contents can verify, then deleting that mount line from /etc/mtab will fix the issue temporarily.

The multiple mounts however is very strange, the system should report that a file system is already mounted on that directory, but it didn't. In fact, I was alerted to this issue by df -h showing dual mounts to the same mount point.

Also, checking: cat /proc/mounts
showed another mounted file system from samba/cifs, that did NOT show in /etc/mtab or df -h, however, when I did: umount <that file system> that worked fine, and it was out of /proc/mounts as expected.

So there's some work to do here. This system is Debian Lenny using backports samba:

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