*ALL NEW* samba questions --- samba and autofs

["Robert P. Goldman" <goldman@htc.honeywell.com>]

With a lot of help from members of this list, I've managed to set up
to mount some filesystems using samba (these from both a net appliance
box and a NT server).

Unfortunately, it seems like samba will drop connections
periodically.  [I'm not sure that "drop connections" is the right
word, but I lose access to the files.]  This makes many of my
applications (e.g., emacs) unhappy.

Question, can I use automounting to solve this problem?  Would it be
possible for the automounter to automagically remount the filesystems
as needed?  Will it be able to notice that the filesystem, while still
mounted, is no longer really there, and remount?

Also, a follow-up question --- if I use the automounter, I will have
to put a password into the automounter mount file (the password is one
of the options to samba mount, since samba trusts people, not
machines).  Question:  is it acceptable to make the autofs mount
information files be readable only by root?  Or do they have to be
world-readable?

Many thanks!
R