Local file browsing when network shares go offline

Desktop Environments XFCE
1

I have a few folders shared and mounted automatically with fstab to a directory in /home/admin/shares/

Sometimes one of the hosts goes down after being already being mounted and until I get to reboot it browsing local files is very slow and difficult, I understand this is typical when a mounted share can’t be found, but is there any trick or tweak to get the file browser to behave normally for local files in this situation?

I’ve tried more than one file browser and they all seem to be effected, Thunar, Dolphin for example

This is how they are mounted…

//192.168.1.43/hdd1 /home/admin/shares/omv/hdd1 credentials=/etc/samba/credentials/share-omv,noperm,iocharset=utf8,_netdev,uid=1000,gid=1001,nofail 0 0
2

Autofs might be an answer (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Autofs).
Network shares are mounted only when needed and do not disturb browsing local folders/files

3

Use a systemd-automount in /etc/fstab instead and it will work much more seamlessly when offline.

4

If you don’t have to use Samba (ie the shares are on another Linux box) then I find SFTP to be much more reliable, and it works happily from bookmarks in Nemo/Dolphin/Thunar. It saves a lot of headaches when editing files for the web.