(Warning: Lots of possibly irrelevant details follow.)
On a recently-rebuilt box, mostly running Lenny, I've just discovered
that if I smbmount a network share from a Windows box the mount point
becomes owned by root.root and my normal user does not have write
access. (A Windows box can still map the share as a drive as this user
and have write access.)
Before the rebuild, the normal user was able to write (and presumably
owned the mount point, although I can't prove it at this point).
(The rebuild became necessary because I was running unstable, and after
a dist-upgrade one day X totally hosed (using mismatched video adapters
for a dual-monitor setup) and the more I tinkered the worse the problem
became, so I just finally gave up and rebuilt to Etch. I've since
dabbled in Lenny, and just today lost my dual-monitor setup again.
Yikes! Some sort of change in X.org comin' down the pike, I reckon. But
I digress ..., er, ramble ....)
Also within the past couple of months we've run into a Samba-related
problem campus-wide with half of our Linux-based backup servers not
being able to authenticate off our Windows-based Active Directory setup,
so we've speculated that Microsoft pushed some update down to our
Windows servers that broke our older Linux backup servers Samba
capability; the newer half of or Linux servers must have a new enough
Samba to handle the break.
So when I noticed that my workstation is having this Samba issue, I
immediately suspected that it's related to the Windows update that we
suspect broke half our backup servers.
So I started reading the man page for smbmount to see if I could find
any clues, and I noticed that smbmount is now deprecated in favor of
using "mount -t cifs".
So being the progressive sort of guy that I am, I decided to drop
smbmount in favor of the cifs option to mount, but I've run into a problem.
1. I've been unable to Google how to mount samba shares using the "mount
-t cifs" method (lots of info on using the "smbmount" method). So what
is the exact syntax equivalent, please, to "smbmount //server/share
/mntpoint -o credentials=LocationOfSecretsFile"
2. "smbmount" could be run as a non-root user, allowing the non-root
user to mount shares on an as-needed basis. The "mount" command, on the
other hand, requires root access, unless the share is pre-defined in
/etc/fstab. Am I just going to have to live with this limitation of
having to pre-define shares in order for non-root users to mount them,
or is there a work-around?
3. Not really a problem, but it took me a while to figure this out, so
I'll go ahead and document it here for the benefit of others: "SMB"
(Server Message Block) is the protocol for remote file access; "CIFS" is
the newer, "better" incarnation of SMB; and "Samba" is the name of the
various utilities that work with the SMB/CIFS protocol.
Thanks for any enlightenment anyone can add!
--
Kent
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