smbmount -- what am I missing?

[Michael H. Warfield]

Lance Simmons enscribed thusly:
> I wish to mount a Win95 share on my linux machine.  I can use smbclient
> to get to the shared disk, using this format:

>     smbclient //win95.machine/share <password>

> The win95.machine is listed in my /etc/hosts file.

> I've tried every permutation of the smbmount syntax that I've been able
> to find in the documentation, dejanews, or this mailing list. Perhaps
> I've missed some. I always get the same error message:

>   Session request failed (131,130) with myname=<MYLINUXMACHINE>
> destname=<WIN95.MACHINE>
>   Called name not present
>   Try to connect to another name (instead of <WIN95.MACHINE>)
>   You may find the -I option useful for this

	"Called name not present" usually means that you were able to
find and connect to the box but when it asked for the specific netbios
name (in this case the machine name padded to 15 characters and terminated
with a space in the 16th character) the responding system reported that the
name didn't exist in it's name table.

> Does the IP address of WIN95.MACHINE need to be somewhere other than in
> my /etc/hosts file? Does the fact that the name of the server is of the
> form "WIN95.MACHINE" make a difference? Do I need to change something on
> the win95 machine itself?

	Huh?  Wait a minute...  Do you mean to say that "WIN95.MACHINE"
is the LITERAL name of the machine?  I first took that to be a generic
comment that this was the Win96 Machine name.  If you literally have a
"." in the middle of that name you are going to have problems, probably
random acts of terrorism type problems.

> Why does smbclient work and smbmount give me this error? Can smbmount be
> made to work?  If not, is there some other way I can mount a win95 share
> on a linux client?

	The new version of smbmount that Tridge has redone based on the
new smbclient lib code may well fix this problem for you.  Currently that
is only available from the Samba 2.0 CVS source tree.  The 2.0.4 version
of smbmount was based on an earlier smbclient (the 1.9 version) and had
a different paradgm for dealing with embedded dots in the names.

> This problem arises on two different linux machines, one running RedHat
> 6.0, the other running Mandrake 6.0, and I've had the same problem
> running RedHat 5.2 in the past.

> I must be missing something fairly fundamental, but if smbclient works,
> it seems that in principle I should be able to get smbmount to work...
> right?

	If you are including dots ('.') in any netbios name - ALL BETS ARE
OFF!  Some things may work and some things may not.  An imbedded dot is
an illegal character in a DNS simple host name (it's the domain separator) and
Windows systems have a bizzarre way of descriminating when a dot indicates
a domain separator, when it indicates a "scope" separator, and when it's
considered an embedded dot.  If the name is 15 characters or less in length
and contains a dot, it first tries netbios (broadcast or WINS) style name
resolution on the entire name.  If that fails, it tries combinations which
may include splitting the name into a simple name and a scope name or trying
the name as a simple name and a domain name.

	This is all going to get much much worse (or better depending on your
point of view) with Windows 2000 which is suppose to use DNS for it's
fundamental name resolution.  Sooo...  If you are using anything illegal to
DNS like imbedded dots or spaces in names, you pays your nickel and you takes
your chance.  It may work sometimes and it may not work others.  And there
is no support and no arguing "but it worked here" because it may only be
working by shear dumb luck.

> Any help would be much appreciated.

	Get rid of the dots in the names, if that's really what you've done.
Whether it works now or not, it is not guaranteeded to work or be supported
even in the near future.  A dash is a nice legal host name character.

> Lance Simmons

	Mike
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