smbmount - file permissions on RH7

[Dormition Skete]

Greetings in Christ our Saviour.

Thank you very much for the patch, and for the information.

The reason I brought this question forth was because I had thought that it
was interferring with a program that I was evaluating.  I had downloaded an
evaluation version of Win4Lin (www.netraverse.com), which allows you to run
Windows 95 or 98 on Linux.  I know that is not very appealing for most of
us, but the simple fact of the matter is, there simply are not linux native
alternatives for some of the software we need to use.  This offered a
promising way to transition from Win98 to Linux.

One of the problems I was running into was in trying to get our networked
database up and running in Win4Lin.  The db program is one that we developed
in-house, and it uses the Borland Database Engine.  I had originally thought
that the creation of net and lock files was failing because of this chmod
problem.  As it turned out, this was not the case.

I guess I'll just have to live with the chmod error messages for now.  I do
appreciate the patch, but right now I have too much on my plate to look at
trying to learn about modifying kernels.  Since it has turned out that this
was not my Win4Lin problem, I will live with this minor inconvience.

On a positive note:  Win4Lin is nice.  It's fast, it works amazingly well,
and it's very inexpensive (albiet, not free).  I could not run our database
on a vfat drive -- it had to be on an ext2 drive -- but once I moved it, it
worked fine... sort of.  Win4Lin doesn't support TCP/IP networking yet, so
you have to do a winsock kind of networking using NFS.  The edits are not
getting posted to the database tables until you close the program.  Then
they are written.  'Not great for interactive databases.  I have to check
into seeing if we can modify the program to work around this, or look at
other alternatives.

Anyway, that's what started all of this.  Thank you again, very much, for
the information and the patch.

In Christ,

Br. Nicholas

----
Dormition Skete
A Monastery of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece and the Diaspora.
Synod of Metropolitan Kallinikos of Lamia.
http://www.BuenaVistaCO.com/GOC
----
----- Original Message -----
From: "Urban Widmark" <urban at teststation.com>
To: "Dormition Skete" <dormitionskete at hotmail.com>
Cc: <samba at us5.samba.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2001 1:50 PM
Subject: Re: smbmount - file permissions on RH7


> On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Dormition Skete wrote:
>
> > According to their documentation, if I understand it correctly, one
should
> > be able to:
> >
> > mkdir /mnt/MtAthos-c
> > chown -R root.smbusers /mnt/MtAthos-c
>
> smbmount/smbfs ignores this and only relies on the options used when
> mounting (uid, gid, fmask, dmask). The docs describe how a unix filesystem
> would react, smbfs is not a unix filesystem. This list of options should
> do what you want:
> uid=1001,gid=1001,fmask=777,dmask=777,guest
>
> However, by itself it will not make the error message go away (see below).
>
>
> > cd /home/nmetsovo
> > cp .Xclients-default /mnt/MtAthos-c/temp/
> > cp: preserving permissions for
> > '/mnt/MtAthos-c/temp/.Xclients-default':Operation not permitted
> >
> > It goes ahead and changes the uid and gid to however it is set when I
mount
> > it, but it gives me this pesky error message, which is killing me...
>
> It doesn't actually change them ...
>
> smbfs does not handle multiple users, all users are the same to the smb
> server. You are getting this error because smbfs can't really do anything
> useful on a chmod request, so it returns an error.
>
> Linux smbfs client Windows server
>
> makes a connection as 'guest' Sees the user 'guest' connecting
> user A creates a new file user guest creates a new file
> user B creates a new file user guest creates a new file
>
> The permissions smbfs show have nothing to do with what is allowed on the
> server (not entirely true, a readonly file is listed as readonly, but
> they are not per-user). smbfs does not know how to tell the server that a
> file should be owned by A, and even if it could it would probably not have
> permission on the server to do so.
>
>
> What exactly is the problem with the error message? Ignoring it seems
> like the easiest way to handle it ...
>
> If you can't ignore them, the attached patch should stop the errors. It
> does on the 2.4.2 kernel I use (and the 2.2 code is identical). You need
> to apply it vs a 2.2.18 kernel source tree, something like this:
>
> % cd $HOME/src
> % tar xvIf linux-2.2.18.tar.bz2
> % cd linux
> % less README
> (and ignore any references to /usr/src)
> % patch -p1 < $HOME/smbfs-2.2.18-mode.patch
> % make xconfig
> (configure it for your hardware, filesystems you use, etc.
> There are others who have described this better than me ...
> See:  http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO.html)
> % make dep
> % make bzImage modules
>
> And as root:
> % make install modules_install
> % vi /etc/lilo.conf
> (add something like this, root= should be the same as your
> existing entries)
> image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.18
>         label=2.2.18
>         read-only
>         root=/dev/hda1
> % lilo
> (this updates the boot stuff, I assume you use lilo as that is
> the RH7 default.)
>
> You should be able to find more help on how to do this on IRC or on some
> (redhat) mailinglist. It is offtopic for this list.
>
> /Urban
>