Cifs and Samba in RHEL 5
 

Hello.

My company has a server with Samba 2.0.7, I am using RHEL 5 and as I noticed it no longer supports smbfs. So I am using cifs to mount the network drives under this server. The mount works and I can explore the drive but I can not write to this drive or open anything up from the drive. Server side restrictions are not set because this is a closed network server so I should be able to do anything or at least read/execute.

There is another server with Samba 2.2.1 running and my computer can read/write/execute/whatever on the drive while mounted as cifs type.

So I am wondering if there is a cifs support conflict with this very old Samba version. RHEL installed Samba rpm samba-3.0.23c-2 on my system.

We are sort of clueless at the moment of why this is happening. We are thinking we need to update the Samba on the server. But if that is not the issue we rather not do this. So if anyone can help point me in the direction to why this is happening, that will be helpful.

Thanks

Well it would be easier to upgrade the server (a good idea)to a newer version of samba.

The other choice is to first rebuild the kernel from source rpm package and add the missing smb configuration settings along with adding support for the older weaker LANMAN security for cifs.

One would also need to rebuild samba from the source as supplied from samba.org to add back the missing older smbfs and related samba support.

Realise that the cifs filesystem is what is supported by the kernel. I think you will need to read the Samba 3.0.23 release notes to understand what the differences might be causing the problem. The Samba 3 Reference and How To guide also goes through the changes between the different versions of Samba. The biggest change may be due to the better domain controller support and the depreciation of the "security =

I think that upgrading the server or at least the samba package if possible would be a good idea. You may run into problems with changes make by MS Vista when it is accepted in your network. However, most of the problems would be on your host, accessing someone elses share than on the server. There may have been subtle changes in the authentication protocol that vista uses. MS used some shortcuts in the past and they tightened up on them. You may have the Samba3-HOWTO reference as either part of the samba package or a samba-doc package. Part IV deals with Upgrading and Migration. Also read the WHATSNEW.txt file that came with your Samba3 installation. There is a cifs.txt file in the kernel source Documentation.