Re: Fixing SMB browsing

[Nate Nielsen <nielsen-list memberwebs com>]

Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> For the past few months at Novell, I've been working on Samba-related
> stuff for gnome-vfs and Nautilus.  Attached is a patch for gnome-vfs's
> smb-method.c which does a few things:

Awesome.

> - Turns off SMBCCTX_FLAG_NO_AUTO_ANONYMOUS_LOGON.  This is what causes
> the "I get prompted for a password for everything" bug.  I have tried to
> figure out why this flag got introduced, but it only seems to cause
> trouble --- our perform_authentication() and its series of fallbacks
> already take the proper steps to ensure that the user is only prompted
> for authentication if absolutely required.

Without this flag if a certain set of credentials fail, then
libsmbclient tries to do an anonymous logon, which from gnome-vfs's
point of view unexpected behavior, user confusion and frustration.
There's also no real simple way to tell (from within gnome-vfs) whether
this 'helpful' behavior occurred or not, but that's beside the point.

smb-method tries to do an anonymous login first before prompting the
user for a password. Obviously we're doing it wrong, if the only way
anonymous logins work is with SMBCCTX_FLAG_NO_AUTO_ANONYMOUS_LOGON
turned off.

We currently use 'guest' as an anonymous login. This fixed problems with
anonymous logins on non-domain simple password based SMB networks. From
what I remember NULL user/password strings is what libsmbclient uses for
it's anonymous login. We may need to do try various anonymous logins
sequentially as (ie: NULL credentials, followed by 'guest').

Note that defaulting to an anonymous login is not a problem. The
fallback in libsmbclient is the only problem. If a user typed in a
username then that should be the only credentials used, and the password
should be rejected when invalid.

In short, the anonymous login code in smb-method needs to be fixed for
all the different kinds of windows networks. Simply removing the flag
will cause user confusion and hard to decipher bug reports.

Again, I think it's great this is being worked on. The sheer number of
possible configurations for SMB networks makes this piece of code a
tough one.

Cheers,
Nate