[Gllug] Combining SMB and NFS - was Embedded Linux & 1Gbps?

[Chris Jones]

Hi

Tom Weissmann wrote:
> I don't see why this has to be necessary. The user provides the auth 
> details for the shares he wants to access. The automounter uses them to 
> try and mount the share. End of story.

How is the user browsing the network graphically going to be prompted by
the kernel for a mount password?
I'm not aware of any infrastructure for that.

> The thing that would require care is stopping other users piggybacking 
> on the first user's permissions.

Indeed, all the more reason for browsing in userspace and mounting with
FUSE inside the user's home directory (the direction things like the
gnome-vfs replacement are going in).

> If we did that at work nobody would be able to get any work done. We use 
> Windows, and one of the useful things it does is automount SMB shares - 
> as long as the user has the necessary permissions, of course :)

Windows is able to do that because SMB is integrated into Explorer and
the other parts of Windows.

In UNIX people tend to put static fstab entries in for the shares they
use (or more recently, mount the shares with nautilus/konqueror and use
applications that are gnome-vfs/KIO aware [with the fallback of copying
the file locally first for the apps that aren't compatible]).

I worked for 9 months on an Active Directory based network where all of
the shares required authentication. I was IT manager so was able to
ignore the IT policy of Windows/Mac only and ran Ubuntu. I connected to
all the shares with Nautilus and did my work as normal. I did have
problems with OpenOffice, but generally I find that I always have
problems with OpenOffice whatever I'm trying to do ;)

> What do you think happens when you access a UNC path in Windows, like 
> \\users\me\photos?

It asks the browse master where \\users is, connects to its IP and
requests the service, prompting for authentication if it is necessary.

Cheers,
-- 
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
   www.tenshu.net
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