Friends--

Have three computers mounting samba shares, and failing mount.cifs on two others.

Production environment, trying to set up a new server, named torus. There is an existing server named mariah, and clients can mount its shares.

torus locally is 192.168.0.203; its tun is 10.8.20.1. Runs Ubuntu 14.04 lts.
mariah locally is 192.168.0.202; its tun is 10.8.1.1.
fire is local client at 192.168.0.6; its tun on torus is 10.8.20.5. fire can mount.cifs the torus shares from the tun 10.8.20.1.
wind is remote client with tun on torus at 10.8.20.13
air is the client with problems. Locally it is 192.168.0.212, and its tun address for torus is 10.8.20.21. (Have also tried installing to another client, kudu, and get the same error, although the openvpn connects.)
All clients but kudu run Ubuntu 12.04 lts, and kudu runs 14.04 lts.
There is another client, svs2, which runs winxp, and it has no problems connecting nor mounting the shares.

All clients, with the exception of wind are behind the router serving 192.168.0.x; they all address the tun via a dynamic dns service.

torus and all clients on tun 10.8.20.x can ping air at its tun address, and air can ping all them on their 10.8.20.x addresses.

So here is the sequence on air: the openvpn connections succeed. Then I do a mount -av, and get this response:

Have also gotten this error:

Searching the Web the last several nights (after 5-6 hours testing and troubleshooting), it appears to me that these error messages point to a whole host of problems, none of which seem to be what I am experiencing!

The toruscredentials file is:
I copied that from the file that reliably connects to the samba server on mariah, and the only difference is that the password is different.

If I try to mount these exact same shares, with the same credentials file over the local network at 192.168.0.x, it mounts OK.

My guesses:

Since we can ping back and forth across the openvpn 10.8.20.x, the connection there seems good.

Since we can connect to the samba shares using the lan 192.168.0.x, then it seems something is incompatible in the samba setup.

There is an iptables firewall on torus; the problem persists whether that is active or non existent: so that seem not to be an issue. There is no firewall on any of the clients at the time these tests are run.

Have checked and apt-get says openvpn on air is already newest version; same for cifs-utils; samba is **not** installed (which seems right).

I have tried:

--Disconnecting air from the mariah tun interface and umount-ing all mounts, then connect only to torus: same error messages.

--Disconnecting wind from the torus tun and try to connect with air: same error messages.

--Setting up the openvpn connection on kudu with same error messages. It also can connect via the lan, but not via tun.

--Checked ifconfig for errors and none are reported

--None of the clients has a /var/log/messages file.

--Checked the permissions in the /etc/openvpn directory, and checked and rechecked the torus.conf file there against the mariah.conf file and see no obvious problems.

--edited smb.conf to provide access to the 10.8.20.x tun. Here is the smb.conf on torus:


Not sure where to go from here. How would you trouble shoot this? I must be missing something obvious....

Thanks from a tired and exasperated...