[Samba] Can I mount with samba on a read-only system?

[Urban Widmark]

On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Dennis Vriezekolk wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to mount with smbmount on a read-only system. I have a
> writable /tmp and /var dir, so it car wirte logs. The samba daemons are
> running fine, but when doing smbmount I get the following error:
> 
> can't lock /etc/mtab~ file
> 
> This is correct, because mtab is read-only. I tried to create a link

It's a known problem.

I want to change things so that 'mount -n' and everything else that 
mount does just would work.

If you are using 2.2.1 you can try this workaround that enables -n and a
"nomtab" option:
http://www.hojdpunkten.ac.se/054/samba/samba-2.2.1-smbmount-no-mtab.patch

It may not apply cleanly to 2.2.2 but the necessary changes are the same.

/Urban