Some linux-cifs-client ideas

[Anthony Liguori]

On Mon, 2004-08-23 at 06:37, Stefan (metze) Metzmacher wrote:
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> 1. What we want
> 
> - - Every unix user should be able to mount and umount cifs shares when he wants it,
> ~  so not only at login time. (using it's own credentials: user/dom/pass or krb5...)

I agree with this except that I think the system admin should be able to
control where that is enabled or not.  I thought this was already
accomplished using a suid bit on the smbmount helper?

> - - (Maybe) browse through the network neighbourhood like browsing through a unix directory

This sort of is already there.  I'll explain.

> 2. Aproach
> 
> - - having a virtuell cifs filesystem (like sysfs) mounted on /cifs
> ~  every unix user should have its own view of this filesystem.
> ~  (this file system will be mounted at boot time).

In Windows, at least, network neighborhood is implemented through a
shell extension.  It's not a real file system (AFAIK) as far as non
shell-aware applications are concerned.  Right now, there is a Samba
plugin for gnome-vfs that implements a network neighborhood (use the
smb:/// URL to see it).

> - - this filesystem has a /cifs/.ioctl file which is the io port for a tool 'cifsmount'
> ~  this will ask the virtuell filesystem to mount or unmount cifs shares.

This kind of gets tricky b/c one would assume you'd bind mount /cifs in
a chroot'd environment.  In this case, the cifsmount tool would have to
keep track of all sorts of weirdness.

> - - there will be a /etc/cifsmount.conf and a per user ~/.cifsmount/config
> ~  for configuration stuff like auth protocol( e.g. disallow lanman...)
> ~  and other stuff
> 
What's wrong with /etc/fstab and automountd?

> 
> Comments please?
> - --
> metze
> 
> Stefan Metzmacher <metze at samba.org> www.samba.org
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-- 
Anthony Liguori
Samba, Linux/Windows Interoperability
Linux Technology Center (LTC) - IBM Austin
E-mail: aliguori at us.ibm.com
Phone: (512) 838-1208
Tie Line: 678-1208