why is mount.cifs so limited?

[Red Squirrel]

On my backup server I have smbmount. I can use very long passwords, and domain accounts, and it works.


On my main server I have mount.cifs but its so freaken limited. It wont accept long passwords, and it wont authenticate to a domain. why is this? Is there a way to get smbmount and replace mount.cifs with it? smbmount is way superior I really don't know why they deprecated it.

 

[drag]

Unfortunately I don't know a lot about smb stuff. Never really use it a whole lot.


I suspect that smbclient is the for the in-kernel support for smbfs, and mount.cifs has support for the in-kernel cifs. Currently smb kernel module is not maintained, has lots of other limitations, and has some security issues were cifs kernel support has all the new hotness. :/

Are you sure about the domain stuff and long password stuff?

I am looking at the man page for mount.cifs and it specificly mentions options for joining the domain and doesn't say anything about password limitations. The only password thing it says is that a password with a comma in it will fail if you try to type it out on the command line, but will work if you use the PASSWD environmental variable.

I don't know, like I said I don't use this stuff much. Maybe the syntax changed from mount.smb vs mount.cifs

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I've tried various things such as domain= or specifying in the user field like domain\user domain/user user/domain user\domain etc... no go, just says access denied on a share that gives the user permission.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
Yeah I've tried various things such as domain= or specifying in the user field like domain\user domain/user user/domain user\domain etc... no go, just says access denied on a share that gives the user permission.

Considering the man page specifically mentions K5 authentication, I'm more inclined to believe that you're doing something wrong.

 

[Nothinman]

You can specify a domain account with domain\\user

 

[Red Squirrel]

This is the mounting part of the script:



mkdir -p /mnt/ravager_applications &> /dev/null 2>&1
umount /mnt/ravager_applications/ &> /dev/null 2>&1

if ! mount.cifs //ravager.loc/applications /mnt/ravager_applications/ -o user=galaxy\\backup_admin,pass="password" ro
then
echo "premature script termination due to mount failure"
exit
fi



And this is the error I get:


mount error 13 = Permission denied
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)
premature script termination due to mount failure


On the machine, the NTFS and share permissions allow backup_admin read access.


This worked until I decided to switch to a domain user, since I'm trying to break loose of using local user for authentication, since the whole point of a domain is centralizing the users.

I'm googling and it seems everyone is having problems with this cifs thing. smbmount was WAY better, really don't know why they had to remove it.

 

[Nothinman]

Small correction, according to the mount.cifs man page you specify a domain with 'dom=blah' instead of blah\\username, I had forgotten about that since it's been so long since I've used either.

Are you running that as root? Regular users can't mount anything unless it's already in /etc/fstab and has the user option specified.

mount.cifs works just as well as smbmount, I've never had a problem with either. The only thing that I can think of that smbmount did that mount.cifs doesn't is if smbmount was setuid root regular users could mount to directories that they owned.

 

[Red Squirrel]

yeah I tried that too, no luck. I tried dom="mydomain", I tried domain="mydomain" I tried without quotes, etc...

From the backup server I can mount that share no problem with smbmount.

The current server I'm trying to mount from is the DC, could that be an issue?

 

[drag]

There could be a bug or a incompatability going on. Use -v for the mount command and then see if you can spot it trying to log in on the server's log. You may have to bump up the debugging level on the server and restart it to get usefull feedback.

That way you can hopefully spot were the proccess is breaking down.

 

[Nothinman]

yeah I tried that too, no luck. I tried dom="mydomain", I tried domain="mydomain" I tried without quotes, etc...

Well I've used dom=domain,user=user without issue. At the very least you shouldn't have to quote the domain because AFAIK you can't have any spaces or other special characters in a Windows domain name.

Have you looked in the event logs on the server?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'm a total noob. I forgot to use smbpasswd command after passwd when I changed the password on the DC. It's working now lol.

And for future reference to myself or others the syntax I'm using is this:

mount.cifs //ravager.loc/applications /mnt/ravager_applications/ -o user=backup_admin,pass="password",dom=galaxy

I've seen about 20 variations of this on different docs, so I'm guessing domain/user and such work too but now that this works I'm not touching it anymore.