AutoFS + Samba share problems when share not online (especially in itunes)

Question

I'm trying to look into having some or all of my media on a server for a couple of my macs, the main one of interest right now being a mac mini working as a HTPC under a tv, being operated 99% of the time with just the apple remote and frontrow.
A friend informed me that if you have your itunes library not managed and add files from a remote share then everything works pretty well. Namely if you try to play a file it will seemingly automount the remote file and start it playing. If the remote server is not available it will quickly discover this and after a short pause start giving explanation marks next to the broken tracks. Get the remote destination connected and then try to play a broken track and it will successfully mount the track and play.
Basically perfect.
I quickly tried accessing these files via a symbolic link or alias to them on the remote drive, in doing this i can be somewhat insulated from problems of trying to move the library to other machines/shares in the future. This all works fine but you do lose the ability for itunes to automatically mount the remote drive, which is a bit of a step back, but not a big deal on my normal machine. On my HTPC machine however i'd really like front row to be able to just work, hence automatically mounting the server as required.
The only problem was that when i tried with files directly added to the itunes library from a remote location frontrow would NOT automount the tracks/videos when you attempted to play them like itunes would do.
I've just spent the last few hours following the advice here
http://rajeev.name/blog/2007/11/22/autofs-goodness-in-apples-leopard-105-part-i/
to setup autofs in the hope that this would let me get auto mounting working as it does with itunes and directly added to the library remote files.
I boiled this down to the following settings
as root
vi /etc/auto_master
and add
/smb auto_smb
then create this new config file
vi /etc/auto_smb
and add
<Mount dir under /smb folder> -fstype=smbfs ://<share user>:<share pass>@<ip address>/<share point>
ie.
testMount -fstype=smbfs ://netuser:[email protected]/remoteMount
finally tell automount to throw away its cache
automount -vc
then the mount should be setup
df -h
shows the indirect map waiting
map auto_smb 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% /smb
and by triggering it
ls /smb/testMount
you should connect and get a listing, a subsequent df shows
df -h
//[email protected]/Media 466Gi 325Gi 141Gi 70% /smb/Media
Everything worked well with the share getting mounted nicely when present, frontrow could just start playing the files it needed, perfect!!
The problem came when i wanted to simulate the media server being offline, basically frontrow, a lot of the system including finder, cd commands attempting to access the share, and itunes if you tried that would all freeze for long periods of time as they tried their best to get the files they were looking for.
I tried looking into getting this to gracefully time out and think i got somewhere by trying to setup the samba share to be soft linked.. I wasn't sure in what files i could add this to, first attempts didn't seem to do anything but adding this seemed to make a difference
/etc/nsmb.conf
containing something like
#Configuration file for example.com
[default]
minauth=ntlmv2
streams=yes
soft=yes
to turn soft samba shares on. Things like cd in a terminal seemed to behave quite well with this, when no remote share present you would get empty folders and the like. Finder would also seem to be reasonable with it.
Frustratingly itunes and frontrow both still have quite massive pauses even when finder and cds in the background show that perhaps the soft links are working and failing like they should.
I'm now left wondering what i can do to fix it, and resorting to perhaps having the files added via a symbolic link, using the login items to launch the remote share every boot and then having it so that all i need to do is reboot the HTPC mac mini if the server is on for it to pick it up and let me play the files. Otherwise they'll just be unavailable and will fail gracefully without locking up itunes. The perfect solution would be to either have a crontab running, or some applescript bound somehow to whenever frontrow is ran which manually tries to tell finder to do the equivelant mount the login items setup does.
It's frustrating though as its so close, and the autofs solution if it did work better would seem to be the perfect solution. Has anyone dabbled with this and got any suggestions as to options you can setup to make things not go horribly wrong when a remote share is NOT present, preferrably within the context of itunes or front row not complaining, but to be honest any suggestions i'll be able to try out myself.
Sorry i've written so much, perhaps some of it will be helpful reference as it took me a while to decipher that link at the top into just setting up a samba autofs.
Cheers.

Answer 1

It seems like it's not only the ArchLinux workstation that displays the norwegian letters wrong. The only machine that shows this correc is the machine that created the file/catalogue.
It seems like the windows 2000 displays the cataloge created by windows XP just fine.