[Samba] Can I update our CIFS kernel module to support SMB 2.1/3 in RHEL/CentOS 6.x?

Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel at gmail.com
Fri Jul 28 12:37:40 UTC 2017


On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 2:01 PM, DW LNDeveloper via samba
<samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> At my company we run server farms based on RHEL/CentOS 6.x and are nowhere near our EOL on those servers yet.  So upgrading them to run RHEL/CentOS 7 in order to gain SMB 2/3 support (since SMB 1 has recently been disabled) is a difficult path for us to take at the present time.
>
> Is it possible to acquire an updated cifs.ko kernel driver that supports SMB 2.1+ or 3 and install and use that module with our existing RHEL/CentOS 6.x server installations?

I think you're going to hurt yourself expecting more recent kernel and
software features on a 6 year old base operating system. The upstream
operating system, RHEL 6, is now on "security patches only" support,
and isn't getting reliable hardware compatibility updates, and
supports only samba-3.6.x natively. It's time to hold your news and
start upgrading, which will be *much* easier if you haven't started
relying on modified hand-installed kernels or backported Samba. Going
to CentOS 7 will get you a much updated kernel and a much updated
samba-4.4.x.

"Just install a new kernel" or installing a custom module is something
I've done on occasion since.... 1999. It sounds *great* and it works
on the developer's laptop where the system doesn't have to stay alive
more than 20 minutes for them to insist on publishing it to
production. It's very dangerous when you've not done, or don't have
the tools to do, a good regression test and burnin for a system under
load.

The Samba 4 upgrade, alone is worth pursuing and getting CentOS 7
started for your environment, in my opinion.



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