GLLUG meeting topics

[bl0wfish]

> Fairly obvious, but that only works if you are root.  Extra options, like
> uid=, gid=, and umask= are in the man page for smbmount.  If you would like
> normal users to be able to mount certain shares, you have to edit /etc/fstab,
> and the *user doing the mount must own the mountpoint*.  If you have the
> following in /etc/fstab,
>
> //BORG/STUFF /mnt/smb/stuff smbfs noauto,user,username=bob,workgroup=
> workgroup
>
> ...then when user bob tries to mount the filesystem, he'll get a misleading
> error message unless /mnt/smb/stuff is owned by bob.  If multiple users on a
> Linux system must access a SMB share, then it is probably best for the share
> to be mounted by root and access to be controlled by the umask= parameter and
> group membership.

    That doesn't really make sense.  Does the mountpoint
    have to actually be "owned" by the user mounting the
    share, or does the user just have to have permissions
    to the mountpoint?  Also, what version of samba and
    smbmount are you running, or are shipped with whatever
    version of RedHat you're using?

    I've had a lot of trouble with smbmount in the past,
    and have a little bit of experience with it, but I've
    never tried to mount shares as a regular user, and not
    root, but it seems like a practical use.

    Maybe creating a small perl/bash script that runs
    smbmount as root to mount the partitions would fix
    the problem without opening up too many security holes?
    It'd be kind of neat to check out smbmount's code
    to see how easy it would be to just modify the mount
    structure.

    Back in the day though, in samba's documentation
    smbmount was described as running the simple 'mount'
    command withe extra paramaters to mount fat16/32
    partitions.

> COnfiguring smbd and nmbd, for making a Linux box serve SMB shares like it was
> a DozeNT box, should be straightforward but there are an awful lot of options.
>  The manpage for smb.conf is 9500 lines long, almost as long as the man page
> for bash(!)  The big thing to watch out for here is permissions problems. If

     You know man pages are searchable, right?
     Anyone that actually trys to read a manpage
     is, IMO, sick & twisted.

> NFS under Linux sucks, but NFS under [insert platform here] sucks.  The
> suckage is consistent, at least, though you may wish to avoid NFSv3 for the
> time being.

      You're joking right?