[mythtv-users] [OT] smbfs weirdness

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Sat Jan 7 18:24:47 UTC 2006


Nathan Ford wrote:

>I run samba for file sharing on my network. I do this primarily
>becuase I have 3 linux machines and 3 windows machines.
>
>Here are the machine names and some details to help me explain whats going on:
>Omoikane - 2.4.32 kernel, samba 3.0.13, Has some shares open
>Kosmos - 2.6.14.2 kernel, samba 3.0.21a, Has some shares open
>Galatea - 2.4.26-epia1 kernel, samba 3.0.9, No Open Shares
>
>When I connect to a share from Omoikane to kosmos, everything is fine.
>Permissions appear correctly, uid, gid, etc is all correct.
>
>When I connect from Galatea to Omoikane or Kosmos everything is fine.
>Permissions, gid, uid, etc are correct.
>
>When I connect to Omoikane from Kosmos, permissions, uid, gid, etc.
>are wrong. All files default to rwxr-xr-x, with root.root as the
>owner. Conecting to a windows share has the same behavior.
>
>When I connect to a windows share from omoikane i get rwxr-xr-x
>root.root wich is what I expect.
>
>The windows share permissions don't bother me. What I can't figure out
>is why only kosmos fails to get privs correctly. The only thing I can
>think of is that kosmos is running a 2/6 kernel whereas the other two
>machines are still using 2.4 kernels.
>
>I took a gander at the kernel configs and saw that the 2.4 kernels had
>a unix extensions option for smbfs, whle the 2.6 configs do not. 2.6
>also had CIFS while 2.4 did not. Has the 2.6 series dropped unix
>extensions in favor of CIFS?
>
>I know the first answer people will propbably give is "use NFS", of
>which I am looking at it. I like samba as it's one network file system
>that I have to trouble shoot and all my machines can use it.
>
>Any clues?
>  
>
Don't know for sure, but I would guess that the Linux 2.4 machines have 
smbfs installed and the Linux 2.6 machine has cifs vfs installed.  
Therefore, on the 2.4 machines, you're using smbmount and on the 2.6 
machine you're using mount.cifs.

The CIFS VFS supports CIFS Unix extensions (that make Windows shares 
behave more like normal Unix filesystems--and a lot less like mounted 
SMB filesystems).  You can disable the CIFS Unix extensions (and use the 
mount like a "normal" Windows share) by writing a "0" (zero for off--or 
is that 0ff ;) to the appropriate "file" in 
/proc/fs/cifs/LinuxExtensionsEnabled using something like:

echo 0 > /proc/fs/cifs/LinuxExtensionsEnabled

TTBOMK, the CIFS VFS is only supported on Linux 2.6 kernels running 
Samba 3.10+, so that's why your 2.4 machines share files the way you 
expect.  And, the CIFS VFS isn't available on a (standard) 2.4 kernel, 
so even when a 2.4 machines connects to the 2.6 machine (which supports 
the extensions), the client on the 2.4 machine doesn't support them, so 
the server shares the files using the smbfs.

Mike


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