I have been searching and experimenting for two days trying to figure out the smb.conf and mount.cifs options that will let me mount a directory on host B, cifs mounted on host A that will permit *any* user on host A to have full access without reqiring each and every user to be in the samba password file. No matter what I try, files are created as read-only. Even using the example given in the vanilla smb.conf-sample:

[tmp]
comment = Temporary file space
path = /tmp
read only = no
public = yes

files created by the remote user are 0640. Not only that, but after creating the file the user can no longer read or update it!!!

ls -l on mounted directory /mnt/tmp to remote directory /tmp:

-rw-r----- 1 nobody nogroup 3547 2013-06-05 15:04 that

Adding:
create mask = 0660
force create mode = 0660

Has no effect. Surely this is a common need. I've googled all over and many forums, including this one, Experts-Exchange, Ubuntu, etc. have threads about this, but they all trail off with no solution determined.

Is there someone at LQ who knows how to do this? Is it even possible with samba?

THX, I really need this.

mount.cifs version 5.6 smbd version 3.5.8

Try this:

mount with
//x.x.x.x/tmp /mnt/tmp cifs iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,nounix,rw 0 0 #? add uid=1000,gid=1000

Also make sure the everyone has read,write & execute privileges on folder /tmp
ie chmod 777 /tmp

I am not an expert, this is just a quick suggestion to disable _any_ security. Be aware.

Regards,
Stefan

have the same problem as the ts

Stefan - thanks for you post. I tried you suggestion. No joy. I believe I have solved the problem, however ...

As I suspected, the resolution is to use NFS, not CIFS. CIFS works great for Windows mounting samba -- it even gives it the 0660/0771 permissions that I specifiy in the smb.conf file. Unix-to-Unix, however, is another story. After doing more googling I've found that numerous people have the same problem trying to cifs mount a remote unix folder on unix. A I mentioned in my original post, none of these threads I've perused have any resolution. I finally tried NFS and it seems to work just fine. Here's my solution:

On the hosting computer: I have a md RAID filesystem (not important to the solution, just for reader FYI) mounted at /mnt/RAID. This filesystem contains several directories, one of which is 'n'.

In the hosting /etc/exports I added the entry:
/mnt/RAID 192.168.0.0/24(rw,root_squash,all_squash,anonuid=1001,anongid=301)

You can read the exports man page for details on these options, but basically, the 'squash' options cause any connecting user (including root) to re-map to the "anonymous" user's id and group. The anaonuid and anongid options specify what the anonymous user's uid and gid, respectively, will be. These ids correspond to a particular user and group on the remote connecting computers AND, most importantly, they correspond the the user and group of the 'guest' account specified in the local smb.conf. This way, whether a user is connecting from a Windows workstation using samba, or a linux host using nfs, they will all access this mount as the same user/group.

Finally, on the hosting computer, I made /etc/rc.d/rc.nfsd executable and ran:
/etc/rc.d/rc.nfsd start # this is the init script location for Slackware

On the remote, mounting host, I added the following to /etc/fstab, where "ohprsstorage" is the hostname of the hosting computer:

ohprsstorage:/mnt/RAID/n /mnt/n nfs nfsvers=3,rw 0 0

I made /etc/rc.d.rc.rpc executable and ran:

$ /etc/rc.d/rc.rpc start
$ mount /mnt/n

It all seems to be working fine. My user's umask on the remote mounting host is 0007, and files I create there on the nfs mounted directory get created with 0664 (I still want 0660, but no big deal for the moment), and with the userid and groupid specified in the exports file. No 'permission denied' or 0640 permissions making it impossible for me to create or update files. I have group r/w permissions for the 10001.301 user so only linux users with group permission can access the nfs mounted files ... just like a real Unix filesystem!

thoughts, comments, refutations, smirks, etc.?