[linux-cifs-client] mount.cifs.c and passwords with ',' in them

[Steven French]

I am not convinced that this is the best way to solve it as it moves the 
problem to a harder to discover (although rarer) collision between sep and 
valid character set (as you noted the separator you chose is valid too 
although quite unlikely to be used in western languages - but could lead 
to somewhat obscure problems if the password did include this character).  


Redhat added an intriguing credential caching (keyring) mechanism to 
2.6.10 now that looks quite useful for storing passwords - and I wanted to 
move cifs to use this (it looks like this was or will be done for the 
Redhat written AFS client already).    I would like to use this as the 
mechanism for mount.cifs to store the password for the mount - and also 
allow this as a way to query if the logged on user already has a password 
stored in the kernel credential keyring (presumably redhat created some 
pam_cred_keyring module to hang on to logon passwords for this kind of 
thing).    If you know of any documentation on this let me know - I really 
don't want mount.cifs or cifs.ko itself to have much code for handling or 
storing passwords since there seems to be a desire to move this to common 
kernel code.

I did strongly consider using an ioctl with a binary buff or passing a 
pointer to a binary buffer via mount but this is a mess when mapping 
pointers across architectures (especially those that are mixed 32/64 bit) 
so that seemed to be less likely to be stable and portable.

Steve French
Senior Software Engineer
Linux Technology Center - IBM Austin
phone: 512-838-2294
email: sfrench at-sign us dot ibm dot com
-------------- next part --------------
HTML attachment scrubbed and removed