Does the smb vfs work for anyone? (with current servers, disabled SMBv1)

["Dr. Thomas Orgis" <thomas orgis uni-hamburg de>]

Hi,

I recently added a local patch to the pkgsrc package for mc on Linux,
adding --enable-vfs-smb to get smbfs support. I am testing a build of
4.8.24 now.

I was surprised to discover that mc seems to feature an independent SMB
client implementation (not the Samba project's libsmbclient). This
would be all fine … if I could make it work:-/

I have an internal SMB server in the organization that smbclient can
talk to just fine. It does SMB2, ntlmssp. I try to connect to the share
with mc and I just get the error  ‘Cannot chdir to "/smb://server/share"’.
Besides a legacy Novell system, there's also the possibility that I
need to talk to Windows servers that use DFS links. Would that be
supported in mc at all?

Anyone got some tips on how to get some more detail on the root cause,
or about some limitation of mc's smb implementation that prohibit
communication with our systems?

Note that we intentionally would like to keep the file connections in
the application layer. This is intended for multi-user systems where we
don't like suid root binaries and users being able to add/remove
mounts. So FUSE is out. I figured that mc would be a nice way to offer
a kind of (remote) file management GUI for the shell servers, to ease
things a bit for the users that have normal GUI file managers at home.
Manually hacking smbclient commands is not that much fun for a lot of
people.


Alrighty then,

Thomas

-- 
Dr. Thomas Orgis
HPC @ Universität Hamburg