[jcifs] samba server lists wrong shares

[Christopher R. Hertel]

Michael B Allen wrote:
> Hi Felix,
> 
> IIRC this is a sort of weird interaction specific to features of Samba
> and JCIFS. JCIFS reuses connections even when credentials are
> different. This is more efficient but when used with the Samba user
> directories feature it will result in listing other users that share
> that transport.

That is because the protocol itself allows and expects multiple
authentications to occur over the same transport connection.  This is due to
the nature of DOS, OS/2, and Windows systems.  They expect that there will
be a single user sitting at the console screen, but that the user may have
different identities on different servers.  Therefore, all of the multiple
authentications over the same connection are being performed by or on the
behalf of that one user.

Even in an NT Domain or Active Directory environment, the Windows client may
use multiple credential sets (including guest and anonymous) to talk to a
server.  Each of these may be active at the same time.

> But there could be a work-around. You can stop JCIFS from reusing
> transports by setting the property jcifs.smb.client.ssnLimit = 1
> (although this will cause a whole new socket and transport object to
> be created for each unique set of credentials which uses a
> considerable amount of resources). I think this will stop the
> aforementioned weird interaction.

What Samba is probably doing is keeping track of which users have been
authenticated over the given connection and using that list to determine
which home directories to return in the shares list.  If that's the case,
and if Windows does *not* do the same, then it may be worth reporting as a
Samba issue.

> Note that JCIFS properties are global and static so beware if you have
> other code using JCIFS for other things, setting this property will
> affect them as well.

This is, however, a worth-while test.  I would be interested in knowing
whether Samba and Windows display the same behavior.

Chris -)-----

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh at ubiqx.org