I have a HP Mediavault network attached storage system, which claims to support the smb and cifs protocols. Under Kubuntu Feisty Fawn I can connect to it using smb with the options dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777, and I then have read-write access to all files on the device. Just what I want.

But under OpenSuSE it's a different story. I can't connect to it using smbfs at all because OpenSuSE doesn't support it even though it includes the package smb4k. When I connect to it using cifs I get read access to all the files on the device but read-write access only to some of them. I have not been able to figure out what it is that distinguishes the files with read access from those with read-write access, and my attempts to change permissions get nowhere. All the files have owner 35000.

So why is the behavior under the two systems different, and what can I do under OpenSuSE to write those files that are presently write-protected?