Macs do freeze – Apple please improve mount handling

I’m really fed up with this now. There’s a lot going on for me at the moment and you don’t need stupid computer problems getting in the way! This is particularly galling considering Apple like to make out that “Macs don’t freeze” (QT .mov)
I’ve noticed ever since getting my first Mac in early 2006 that OS X doesn’t like bad volumes/mounts. Examples:

• Find a really screwed up music CD and put it in your Mac. If it is properly scratched your OS X Mac will go away for maybe 15minutes, semi-locked up in an unusable state, until finally it gives up on the disk and you get some control back.
• Harder to reproduce: mount a shared volume on the network, and have the network “go away”. Try to access the share. zzzzzzzzzzz
• Even harder to reproduce, my current problem: Have an external NAS exposing AFP shares where there is some kind of obscure problem, corrupt resource forks or something. The machine goes into a catatonic state when you try to mount this shared network volume.

Another fun side effect is that often when this happen you can try relaunching Finder but it makes no different. Typically you can no longer open applications from the Dock either.

All I can say is WHY?! For christ’s sake mounting volumes has been around since the beginning of time and losing control of a machine so that you have to power it down just because a network share has a problem with it is tantamount to a denial of service attack vector!

Trust me, I ssh’d into the mac in question, tried to kill the AFP mounting processes, no joy. I tried “shutdown -r now” and it went through the motions but nothing happened.

I’ve even tried to run mount_afp from the command line to see if it was a UI related issue but no… a mount attempt at the command line with AFP for some reason dies, from any of my Macs. The shares on the NAS can be accessed via SMB from all the macs no problem.

It’s really quite depressing. Apple please sort it out, my patience is wearing thin.