SMBMount as user

lcdial · 04-28-2004, 12:46 AM

Hello,

I've looked on this forum and found some advice, but it didn't seem to work for me. I'm trying to allow users to mount samba shares (winxp actually). Here's what I've done:

1) At first. it would not let me mount it at all. So I followed some advice on this forum and ran the following commands:

Code:

# chmod a+s `which smbmount`
# chmod a+xs /usr/bin/smbmnt

2) Then it gave me an error that libsmb can *NOT* be run suid root. So I looked for that, and I found that I should run the following:

Code:

# chmod 700 /usr/bin/smbmou
# chmod 700 /usr/bin/smbmount
# chmod 700 /usr/bin/smbumount

3) NOW, I can "mount" the shares as a user, but I get nothing, e.g.

Code:

$ mount /mnt/laptop
$ ls /mnt/laptop/
$ su
# mount /mnt/laptop
# ls /mnt/laptop
(directory listing)

Here's my fstab entry (userid and password omitted):

Code:

//laptop-xp/shared /mnt/laptop smb uid=XXXXXX,dmask=777,fmask=777,password=XXXXX,noauto,user,owner 0 0

Anyone ever encounter anything like this? Thanks in advance!!!

ToeShot · 04-28-2004, 01:01 AM

I am not sure how the smb mount works i\with the fstab file. I have never tried it like that. What I would suggest is trying to mount it manully first like this:

mount -t smbfs -o username=administrator,password=******** //Captain/Share /captain

obviously your directories will be different but if you get this command working then you know there is a problem with the fstab file

HTH

lcdial · 04-28-2004, 06:15 PM

Thanks for the suggestion. When I try the mount -t command, I get
"Only root can do that"

I want to be able to have my users mount and unmount the smb share. Surely this must be possible -- any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

lcdial · 04-28-2004, 08:54 PM

Okay, I used the elephant to squash the ant and uninstalled and reinstalled samba. It now works semi-appropriately, but I have a bizarre permissions problem:

Users can mount samba shares within their user directories with smbmount, i.e.

Code:

$smbmount //computer/service /home/user/sambamount

BUT users cannot mount to /mnt! i.e.:

Code:

$smbmount //computer/service /mnt/sambamount
cannot mount on /mnt/sambamount: Operation not permitted
smbmnt failed: 1

Samba documentation states that this is a permission problem. So I changed the permissions to 777 on /mnt and /mnt/sambamount and I get the same thing. I think Samba is just out to get me!!!

If anyone has any ideas, I'd really appreciate them. This seems like it should be pretty simple. Thanks in advance!

lcdial · 05-02-2004, 11:54 AM

Well, I think I found the problem. According to the smbmnt man page,

Code:

A setuid smbmnt will only allow mounts on directories owned by the user, and that the user has write permission on.

So it looks like the user has to have write permissions on the directory and own it. Does anyone know if there is a way around this? Thanks!

arete1969 · 05-02-2004, 04:11 PM

I probably shouldn't say anything since I'm having problems of my own, but here's a way around mounting that I really like: smb://compname in the location bar of, say, Konqueror or whatever your file tool is. It works by hostname and ip, and if you have write access you can add/modify files just as if it were a regular, mounted share. It doesn't work on the command line, though. : (

Hegemon · 11-03-2004, 03:58 AM

You could try writing a simple script that mounts the drive and suiding that script to run as root. Suid is generally considered a security risk but it should be fine on home systems.