[Samba] Question about smbc_stat() and smbc_statvfs() in libsmbclient

[Jeremy Allison]

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 11:36:18PM +0200, Peter Eriksson via samba wrote:
> I’ve been writing some code that uses libsmbclient to talk to SMB servers
> and I’m a little bit confused why ‘smbc_stat()’ sets the
> st_uid & st_gid to the uid & gid of the process calling it,
> instead of trying to map the real owner & group of the path or setting it to -1:-1 if it can’t do that...
> 
> But there is probably some good reason for this?

That's really old code that was designed to talk
to SMB1 servers that might predate real identity.

This is a thornier problem than it looks.

smbc_stat() does one network call to get the file
info. For SMB2+ in order to convert the owner
information (which is in SID form) to a uid/gid
that has any meaning to the local filesystem you
have to do extra network calls/mapping, as you
describe below.

> Ie, if I call something like this:
> 
> > main() {
> >  struct stat sb;
> >  …(connect to share etc)
> > smbc_stat(“smb://user@server/share/dir <smb://user@server/share/dir>”, &sb);
> > printf(“uid = %d, gid = %d\n”, sb.st_uid, sb.st_gid);
> > }
> 
> Then my local uid&gid will be printed and not the owner of ‘dir’ (not even the user I’m connecting as).
> 
> 
> I can get the real owner & group via:
> 
> >  const char *owner_attr = "system.nt_sec_desc.owner+";
> >  const char *group_attr = "system.nt_sec_desc.group+";
> >  char buf[256];
> > 
> > smbc_getxattr(path, owner_attr, buf, sizeof(buf)):
> > printf("Owner='%s'\n", path, buf);
> > smbc_getxattr(path, group_attr, buf, sizeof(buf)) < 0)
> > printf(“Group=%s\n”, buf);
> 
> (And then manually translating the username & group in but to an uid/gid - so I can work around it but it’s annoying anyway :-)

So that's doing a set of network RPC's to look up
the SIDs from the server to get names.

If you think about this, there's no guarantee that
the remote names on the server have meaning on the
local system - that's why SIDs have a global namespace.

But there's no way to squeeze a SID into a uid/gid
without a pre-defined lossy mapping.