samba - Feb 2002 - Questions on Mounting user shares [was:Re: Mounting SMB shares without root]

Hello,

//pls refer to the mail entitled "Mounting SMB shares w/o root" below.

I have to face a similar problem also.

What I intended to do is for users on the client machine(linux) to be able 
to mount their own smb share from the server(linux). In this case, I thought 
of setting up one share each for the users of the system.

When this non-root user logs in to the client machine, how is he/she able to 
mount their own particular share from the server?

In another words, i wanted to set it up just like a NT environment, where U 
can "map" drives from remote machines as non-admin user.

I have tried the "putting it in fstab" approach, but only one username
option can be given there, so if someone else uses this machine, they will 
not be able to mount their shares. BTW, with that I was able to let a 
non-root user mount a share, but limited to only that user.

Is that the best i can do by putting the entry in fstab ?

How can I use autofs or pam_mount in this case to achieve this ?

Any other methods?

Thank u in Advance.

Louis Lam
>From: Urban Widmark <urban@teststation.com>
>To: "Marc R. Hoffman" <emulator@mac.com>
>CC: <samba@samba.org>
>Subject: Re: Mounting SMB shares without root
>Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 09:47:41 +0100 (CET)
>
>On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Marc R. Hoffman wrote:
>
> > How for the really big question...How do I set this up in the
/etc/fstab
> > so that the share auto-mounts without mounting in root? I can get it
to
> > mount, but without the root account, I can "look, but no
touch"...
>
>1. Look at the uid/gid/fmask/dmask options to smbmount.
>2. smbmount when run from /etc/fstab does not support all mount options,
>    specifically not the "user" option, so it must be mounted by
root. For
>    now try autofs, pam_mount to allow automatic mounting by non-root.
>
>/Urban
>
>
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On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Louis Lam wrote:
> What I intended to do is for users on the client machine(linux) to be able 
> to mount their own smb share from the server(linux). In this case, I
thought
> of setting up one share each for the users of the system.
Currently, just using NFS might be easier between 2 unix systems. If
that's not an option then ...

> When this non-root user logs in to the client machine, how is he/she able
to
> mount their own particular share from the server?
> 
> In another words, i wanted to set it up just like a NT environment, where U
> can "map" drives from remote machines as non-admin user.
At login time or sometime later? I believe pam_mount exists to solve the 
login-case. Can't give you any advise on it as I have never used it.
(search this list on marc.theaimsgroup.com, it has been discussed before)


If you install smbmnt setuid root then anyone can mount any smb share on
any directory they own:

mkdir $HOME/smb_mountA
smbmount //server/share $HOME/smb_mountA -o username=puw

Look at LinNeighborhood for a GUI browsing tool that allows you to mount 
shares.


Putting things in fstab is not the only way to get things mounted.

fstab or autofs can be useful if you give each user their own mountpoint
(kind of silly), or create a group of the users you want to give access to
and let that group own the files with the 'gid' option.

/Urban