It turned out that I had shut off a Win98 box on my humble network without first unmounting its Samba shares. The clue came when an lsof command hung. With the shares unmounted, lsof worked and flash sound worked again. The URL in question is http://www.infonegocio.com/xeron/bruno/italy.html .
My system:
FC1
[rj@mavis rj]$ uname -a
Linux mavis 2.4.22-1.2149.nptl #1 Wed Jan 7 12:57:33 EST 2004 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
Asus A7N8X Deluxe m/b with onboard NICs disabled. Using instead
[root@mavis root]# lspci -v | grep Intel
02:04.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 05)
Subsystem: Intel Corp. EtherExpress PRO/100+ Dual Port Adapter
02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 05)
Subsystem: Intel Corp. EtherExpress PRO/100+ Dual Port Adapter
[rj@mavis rj]$ uname -a
Linux mavis 2.4.22-1.2149.nptl #1 Wed Jan 7 12:57:33 EST 2004 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
[root@mavis root]# cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/hdb2 /mnt/hdb ext3 noauto,users,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
//clem/c /mnt/clemc smbfs noauto,users,credentials=/home/rj/credentials,umask=000
//clem/a /mnt/clema smbfs noauto,users,credentials=/home/rj/credentials,umask=000
[root@mavis root]#
Everything else is pretty much "vanilla".
I added the "noauto" to the last 2 lines above just a few minutes ago, but that certainly won't prevent a recurrence of the problem. Perhaps someone will come up with a short script to automagically issue a couple of umount commands when the LAN link goes down.
-- Keep on keepin' on.
09:00:00 up 12 days, 22:00, 7 users, load average: 0.14, 0.12, 0.09
One billion seconds ago it was 08:13:20 CDT Sun 06/04/72