samba - Mar 2005 - Mounting directories below share level

>From my investigations, and searching the archives, it seems that smbfs can 
only mount shares, and not directories under the share

i.e.

smbmount //host/share /mnt		works
smbmount //host/share/directory /mnt	doesn't work

Our W2K3 server has user home directories in a tree where there are no user 
rights to the next node up the tree (level1), which is the directory on the 
share, 

i.e. //host/share/level1/user_home_directories

We need to directly mount //host/share/level1/user_home_directory on Linux 
clients, as we can do on 2000/XP clients.  Will linux_cifs give me that 
possibility?

Thanks

John Landamore

School of Mathematics & Computer Science
University of Leicester
University Road, LEICESTER, LE1 7RH
J.Landamore@mcs.le.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)116 2523410       Fax: +44 (0)116 2523604

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 03:13:36PM +0000, J. A. Landamore
wrote:
> >From my investigations, and searching the archives, it seems that smbfs
can
> only mount shares, and not directories under the share
> 
> i.e.
> 
> smbmount //host/share /mnt		works
> smbmount //host/share/directory /mnt	doesn't work
Yes.  That's because the protocol itself wasn't really designed to do
what
you're trying to do.

On the other hand, I just tried it and I can indeed mount a subdirectory
of a share under W2K.  I'll need to do a packet capture later on see
what's going on here.

The server in my little test was Samba, and I don't recall that we had to
do anything to specifically support this, so my guess (without looking at
captures) is that W2K is actually doing a tree connect to the share itself
and then mapping the drive letter to the subdirectory (sort of like the
old 'subst' command).

It's possible that the entire UNC path (including the subdirectory name)
is being provided in the TreeConnect...  I'd have to take a look.

Steve:  Any insight?

Chris -)-----

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh@ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh@ubiqx.org

>>>>> "J" == J A Landamore <jal@mcs.le.ac.uk>
writes:
    >> From my investigations, and searching the archives, it seems
    >> that smbfs can
    J> only mount shares, and not directories under the share

    J> i.e.

    J> smbmount //host/share /mnt works smbmount
    J> //host/share/directory /mnt doesn't work

MS call this "Deep Mapping".

    J> Our W2K3 server has user home directories in a tree where there
    J> are no user rights to the next node up the tree (level1), which
    J> is the directory on the share,

    J> i.e. //host/share/level1/user_home_directories

We've used to have that situation and had to give it up, so now
inheritance is blocked at the user's home directory and their rights
explicitly put on it again.  Messy.

    J> We need to directly mount
    J> //host/share/level1/user_home_directory on Linux clients, as we
    J> can do on 2000/XP clients.  Will linux_cifs give me that
    J> possibility?

MacOS can't do it either.  However, a possible server and client side
workaround could be to allow "traverse folder" rights on the folder
that's shared, and then do a "mount -o bind" on the client side to
where you want the real home directory to appear.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Kenny.

-- 
Desktop Services Team, EUCS.

University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Just FYI...  I added a short annotation regarding this thread here:

  http://ubiqx.org/cifs/NetBIOS.html#NBT.1.1

(Click the "Notes" icon.)

I do hope that we'll get client developers (Steve, Conrad, the Thursby 
folk, etc.) to implement this feature.

Chris -)-----

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh@ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh@ubiqx.org