[Samba] how to mount shares as a user without mount.cifs setuid

[Jeff Layton]

On Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:44:47 -0400
Gary Dale <garydale at rogers.com> wrote:

> I'm running Debian/Squeeze on an AMD64 system. For some reason they have 
> recently stopped shipping mount.cifs with the setuid bit set.

That would be because it was horribly unsecure.

>  Now it 
> appears that they have changed the internal settings to prevent it from 
> running setuid. This means that I can't define the share in fstab with 
> "user" and connect from my Linux user account. Mounting smb/cifs shares 
> seems to be blocked except for root.
> 

Yes, we added a patch a while back to make it such that mount.cifs
would not allow itself to run as a setuid root program unless it that
check was compiled out.

This was done due to a rather constant stream of "security issues" that
were brought about when people installed mount.cifs setuid root. Since
it had never been vetted for security, we really had no other choice to
communicate that installing it setuid root was unsafe.

> Presumably this has been done for security reasons. However, I can't 
> currently do much with my network shares unless I'm root because the 
> shares and all the files are owned by root:root. This is despite the 
> fstab setting username=<my windows account name> and I get prompted for 
> the password. That only seems to be used for connecting to the share, 
> not for the permissions.
> 
> My Debian box hasn't joined a domain - I'm just using local accounts. I 
> mainly have the domain for some Windows boxes used by my family.
> 
> How do I mount an smb/cifs share as a normal user without running 
> mount.cifs? Or if I have to mount the share as root, how can I get 
> reasonable access to the shares?
> 

You need to set the uid=/gid= options when mounting. When it's run by a
non-root user, /bin/mount adds these options automatically.

It's also worthwhile to note that I've recently re-enabled the ability
to run mount.cifs as a setuid root program in the latest cifs-utils
release:

http://linux-cifs.samba.org/cifs-utils/

...you may want to switch to using that instead if you need the ability
to use mount.cifs in this way.

-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton at samba.org>