[Samba] How to automate SMBMNT

[Buchan Milne]

> Message: 21
> Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 22:20:08 +0200 (CEST)
> From: Urban Widmark <urban at teststation.com>
> To: Michael Marano <michael.marano at m23.com>
> Cc: samba at samba.org
> Subject: RE: [Samba] How to automate SMBMNT
> 
> On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Michael Marano wrote:
> 
> 
>> I have a tangential question based upon your response about the
>> credentials file. I have set up a smbmount to happen on boot in
>> /etc/fstab, but am looking for a good way to not be prompted for the
>> password, and not have the password in plaintext in /etc/fstab, or in a
>> credentials file.  Do you know how I can acheive this?
> 
> 
> I think pam_mount does what you want. It uses the username/password you
> use to login to the linux box in the smbfs mount command.
> 
> 
> smbmount could be modified to work with some kind of "ssh-agent" workalike
> to allow you to give the username/password once and then re-use it for
> your other mount requests. It wouldn't even have to be a smbmount specific
> daemon.
> 

You mean something like this?

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/smbfs/index.html

But, every time I think about this, it makes me wonder if this ins't 
what kerberos is supposed to do (aka I don't like having anything around 
which caches the clear-text passowrd).


> I don't think any of the smb related pam modules do this (or winbindd or
> ...) but I haven't really looked.

If something like this were to occur, then it would be nice if it were 
standardised, so that all linux smb clients could use it. Including 
smbclient, smbmount, pam_mount (in case smbmount doesn't find a running 
daemon when pam_mount runs it), kio_smb, the gnome-vfs module for smb, 
komba2 (so it doesn't need your password to find shares on a server that 
doesn't allow guest connections) etc.

BTW, we got a patch from a user who had problems with smbmount's hanging 
when the smb server went down, to run umount2 on the mount point. 
Interested?

Buchan

-- 
|----------------Registered Linux User #182071-----------------|
Buchan Milne                Mechanical Engineer, Network Manager
Cellphone * Work            +27 82 472 2231 * +27 21 8828820x121
Stellenbosch Automotive Engineering         http://www.cae.co.za
GPG Key                   http://ranger.dnsalias.com/bgmilne.asc
1024D/60D204A7 2919 E232 5610 A038 87B1 72D6 AC92 BA50 60D2 04A7