Thread: At shutdown/restart - failed to unmount /home - failed to unmount /net

In verbose I get this message at shutdown/restart:

failed to unmount /home
failed to unmount /net

It does actually restart & shutdown okay though, but what does it mean? I've searched Google, there's a couple of threads on insanelymac, one post says "that message is normal" and there's another in the Italian section. They're both kalyway threads though:

This is because the startup daemon (autofs) tries to load and not being present clearly can not even remove them to shutdown, but we are smarter than us and since we remove automatic!

Thanks in advance.

According to a post I found in an article titled "Explaining odd entries in 'df' output UNIX" I don't think that unmounting /net /home failure is a problem. The relevant quote is by leamanc (profile on [url=http://hints.macworld.com/[/url] somewhere):

As has been noted above several times, these two filesystems--/net and /home--are related to the new auto-mount daemon introduced in 10.5. I haven't seen anyone mention what their primary purpose is, and that is to provide mountpoints for clients managed by OS X Server. If your home folder lives on the server (and syncs to your local machine), it will be placed under /home, which is traditionally where Unix-like systems store home folders (instead of OS X's usual /Users). And your auto-mounted sharepoints will live under /net, instead of the usual place in OS X--/Volumes.

If you start up your non-managed Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 machines in verbose mode (cmd-V at startup), you will notice on shutdown the following two entries on the console screen:


Unmounting of /home failed
Unmounting of /net failed

This is nothing to be alarmed about; the unmounting failed because you never mounted anything there in the first place, because you are not a managed client. Some folks I've seen on the 'Net have wrongfully assumed these entries were due to a bug in Apple's code.

I spent a long time finding this answer so now I have tried to spread it around the web a bit. Hopefully the original poster doesn't mind.