[Samba] Friend's post in moderation queue for a week... why so long, please? And getting "permission denied" trying to mount an SMB share

[Michael Wood]

Hi

On 29 November 2010 21:45, Aleksey Tsalolikhin <atsaloli.tech at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> In the meantime, I'm posting the question on his behalf:
>
> I’ve got two very vanilla installs of centos one 5.5 the other 5.4.
> The 5.4 is the “server” and the 5.5 is the client. I have set up a SMB
> share on the server and I am trying to mount that share from the
> client. I get error 13 permission denied. When I check the messages I
> see that the server is requesting the password as plain text but the
> client is not configured that way. When I cat
> /proc/fs/cifs/SecurityFlags I get 0x7. The docs list the default as
> 0x07007. If I open the file with a binary editor I see… nothing. There
> is nothing in the file.

Files in /proc are not real files, but just a way for the kernel to
provide some way for you to see what it's doing or tweak things.

See e.g. http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/proc.html
for more details.

> Is there some other method to edit the security flags file? I see may

The way you "edit" files in proc is simply by doing:
echo newvalue >/proc/blah

but, you can only do this if the file is writable.  And if it's not
writable you cannot simply chmod u+w it.  If it's not writable it is
because the kernel does not accept direct modifications of that value.

> use plaintext passwords as 0x00020 in the mount.cifs doc but no
> instructions on how to change the flag. Even more curiously these
> files seem to be continuously updated as they (all of the flag files
> in that directory) have current timestamps.  The permissions on the
> files are all set ass read only and even if I went in and changed the
> contents it is not clear that it wouldn’t be immediately overwritten
> by something else.

This is explained by the fact that /proc is a sort of virtual
filesystem as explained by the link above.

> This seems to be related to other problems I have had with SMB shares.
> Is there some other security console where these protocol policies are
> managed?  Thanks

You might want to ask on the linux-cifs mailing list, since it seems
you're asking about mount.cifs.

http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-cifs

See also:

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

-- 
Michael Wood <esiotrot at gmail.com>