This weekend I hit a sale at Fry's and picked up a Buffalo Linkstation Duo, which has a pair of 2TB mirrored disks installed.  Since it talks only CIFS and AFP, I had to communicate with it via CIFS from one Linux box to, well, the Buffalo is also a Linux box.  I permanently put the Buffalo into my /etc/fstab file so I could mount it easily.

This broke Gnome.  Every time I booted into X, Gnome would lock up.  It turns out Nautilus wants to mount the directories and then lstat() them, and this is broken by default.  Nautilus never timed out, either, so the Xinit would just hang, forever.

The solution is to add "noserverino" to the options in /etc/fstab.  The Buffalo appears to have an older CIFS server, one that doesn't generate inode numbers correctly.  The only thing this breaks is that hardlinks may not be detectable on the CIFS server, but I rarely use hardlinks. What a pain in the neck, and how hard is it to document that somewhere?