[Samba] Cannot access WD's NetCenter drive from linux

[samba newbie]

Hello folks.

I bought a Western Digital NetCenter drive since it
seemed a low-cost way of having a NAS in my home.  The
NetCenter drives run GPL'ed software (I downloaded the
source from Western Digital's Web site, and it refers
to Broadcom's "BCM478x Linux NASoC Software."  The src
directory also contains samba 3.0.2.)

The device offers two ways of accessing your data:
through CIFS, or through NFS.  There is no security on
NFS shares.  You can specify share-level passwords for
CIFS, which is better than nothing, so that seemed to
be the way to go.  Also, my data lives on a Windows
box, so CIFS made sense.

Now, I want to access that data using Samba from 
Fedora Core 3 (2.6.12-1.1378_FC3).  On my Linux box, I
mount one of the shares using:

mount -t smbfs -o ro //192.168.0.251/Pictures
/media/Pictures

This prompts me for a password, and upon correct
entry, it goes ahead and mounts the share.  So far, so
good.

I can also go ahead and read the directory structure
without any problems.  Running the following for 20
minutes:

while [ 1 ]; do find /media/Pictures -print -exec stat
{} \; >/dev/null; sleep 1; done

caused no problems.

However, as soon as I actually tried reading a file,
access to that directory hung.  I could no longer 'ls'
anything in that directory.  The stat command reported
input/output errors.

/var/log/messages is full of errors along the lines
of:
Jul 24 16:57:51 mj-desktop kernel: smb_add_request:
request [f5d3b980, mid=10175] timed out!
Jul 24 16:57:51 mj-desktop kernel: smb_lookup: find
//sub_folder failed, error=-5

I can also no longer umount that directory; Linux
thinks the device is busy.  I can't rmmod the smbfs
kernel module.  The only way to recover is to reboot
the machine.

If, on my Linux machine, after rebooting, I mount the
share and quickly try to cp a file over from the
remote share to my linux machine, it occasionally
works.  So, for a very short bit of time (on the order
of a minute), the access works correctly. 

I found through google that mounting using cifs should
allow me to gather more debugging info on the client
side (since I can do 'echo 1 >
/proc/fs/cifs/cifsFYI').  So I tried to mount my share
using 'mount -t cifs'.  Unfortunately, this fails with
return code -1.  I think this is because the mount is
trying to do user-level authentication (since it
correctly sends my share-level password, but also
reports to the server that the user is 'root').  I get
back:

Status code returned 0xc000006a
NT_STATUS_WRONG_PASSWORD

There is no documentation on the mount.cifs man page
to force share-level authentication.

At this stage, I'm stumped.  I have no access to the
server logs (since the NetCenter is a black-box
appliance). 

I should note that access from my Windows box worked
fine, at least for writing.  I spent the last few days
backing up over 100GB of music and pictures to shares
on the NetCenter from my Windows machine.  It's a
shame I can only access it from that machine.  It
makes the idea of buying the device pointless: if the
only machine that can access it is my Windows box,
it's cheaper (and much faster) to simply hook up an
external USB drive to it.  But I digress...

Any ideas?  Is there anything else I can do to gather
more debugging data?  Any mount options I should try?

I should mention that similar access from Mac OS X
(10.4.7) doesn't appear to hang.  I can mount using
the same command-line options, and access the data
without difficulty.  So maybe this is an issue with
the kernel on my linux box?  Is this a known issue
that is solved in later kernels?

Thanks!

P.S.  I had submitted a support request to Western
Digital asking for help with this problem (I had also
asked whether they could let me know how to access the
logs or how to roll my own firmware from the source). 
They just wrote back saying that Broadcom downsized
the department that wrote the software, and thus they
have no answers for me.  Lovely.


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com