[Hampshire] autofs timeouts

Hi all,

I have set up autofs to NFS mount a directory from my home server.
This is on a laptop which is frequently disconnected from my home
network. When disconnected I would expect that if I was to browse to
the mount point then I would end up waiting for a timeout since the
server would not be available. What I did not expect was that some
applications (eg kpdf) would try to access files in it's recently used
files list causing the same delay. What's worse is that it does this
before even popping up a window/dialogue so it appeared that actually
kpdf was broken.

Is there anything I can do to make the failure happen faster? It seems
to take several minutes right now. I have set the "-soft" option but
the only timeout option I can see is for the unmount period when you
are no longer accessing the mounted filesystem.

My first thought would be to replace the mount rules with a script
(like the default auto.net) doing a ping and failing instantly if
there is no reply but maybe there is a simpler way?

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks
Rich