Ubuntu Servers :: Unreachable /etc/fstab Cifs/smbfs Mount Halts Boot?

I have the following two lines at the bottom of my /etc/fstab

Quote:
//172.16.6.15/e /tmp/e cifs _netdev,iocharset=utf8,credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,gid=0 0 0
//172.16.6.15/e/Public /var/www/index/pub cifs _netdev,iocharset=utf8,credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,gid=0 0 0
My server address is 172.16.6.1.

If the destination (which is my workstation desktop) 172.16.6.15 is offline when the server tries to boot, the entire boot procedure halts with the following message: Unable to find suitable address. mountall: mount <destination> terminated with status 2 The problem is that my server runs headlessly, and every time something silly like this happens where you'd normally expect the OS to continue regardless, I'm forced to plug a monitor in and diagnose on console

So my question: Is there any way to make it proceed with the boot normally despite the host being unreachable? I could probably chuck a mount command into crontab or /etc/rc.local or a /etc/network/if-up.d script, but isn't this the way it really should be done (/etc/fstab)? If so, then we shouldn't expect the entire boot to halt just because a network share can't be mounted, right? While on the topic of a headless ubuntu server 10.10 not booting without some kind of intervention, I have yet another issue: If the server goes down without proper shutdown (power failure, for example) the grub menu displays the kernel choices and there's no countdown timer. Instead, I have to manually press enter to continue the boot. Is there any way around this? Clearly this should not be the case for a server distribution