On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Urban Widmark wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Sep 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > I fixed this by changing and recompiling mount_smbfs.c as follows:
>
> ... or you can fix it yourself (but good luck getting hpa to accept
> changes to mount_smbfs, he has expressed a certain "unhappiness" with
> smbfs lately on this list :)
>
> A third way to fix it is to change smbmount to accept options in normal
> mount format and calling it mount.smbfs. That would make the mount_smbfs
> module redundant.
> (Maybe it's time I sent my "lovely" patch to the smbmount maintainer again
> ... perhaps he lost it?)
I've been playing with autofs and smbfs for the past couple days, with
the following discoveries:
HPA is right; smbfs has problems, and mount_smbfs.c is a waste.
He (and anyone else working on autofs) has better things to do.
The more recent samba versions are getting better client-side support,
even if samba people pretty much disown smbfs as Linux-only. If
you're not using the latest samba clients, you should be.
The best solution for smbfs mounting I've seen is the "mount.smb"
script (and "mount.smbfs" symlink) included in Red Hat's distribution
of the samba clients. /bin/mount calls this script, and it basically
lets you "mount -t smb //server/share /mount/point" as if it were
normal, and the call to smbmount occurs behind the scenes. This
doesn't affect the mount() system call, but it works for programs like
autofs's mount_generic.so module that fork/exec the mount command.
I personally think mount_smbfs.c should be thrown away (would this be
a mount_smbfs change that HPA would be happy with?), smbfs should be
removed from the list of non-generic filesystems, and people and
distributions should be encouraged to just make their mount programs
work right.
There are problems using whitespace in the mountpoint name given to
smbmount, and problems using whitespace in the device name given to
autofs. More on that in another post.
---
Roy Stogner
