Samba on Michael’s Domain

1000 times too slow

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Helsinki University has outsourced parts of its IT infrastructure to Microsoft. Even if outsourcing is cheaper in the short term than generating equivalent services locally, the net effect is likely negative due to the lost jobs, know how and independence. It doesn’t need a conspiracy to explain this self-destructive behavior, just bad decision criteria, which do not include long term and externalized costs.In its push to upgrade to newer Windows versions, Microsoft ended extended support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014 and the university obeyed by denying network access to XP machines. The argument was that XP was becoming a security risk. At the same time, Windows XP accounted still for about 20% of all Windows installations on this planet ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ ). Even in October 2015, well above 100 Million computers did still run Windows XP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems and https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ ) without any catastrophic consequences.The ban of Windows XP was a problem, since four of our devices, that we need for research, are still running Windows XP. And there is no way to upgrade the OS without upgrading the equipment (which would cost thousands or tens of thousands of Euros and therefore is mostly impossible in the present tight financial situation of the university). And of course, the software that is needed to operate the devices is not compatible with Windows 7. As a consequence, we can neither remotely operate this machinery nor do automated backups. Even taking the data for analysis to another computer requires the Adidas network .I had contacted IT support well before the extended support of Windows XP ended and asked them to find a solution. Apparently there were different possible solutions and IT support did start to implement them, but because of personnel fluctuations, the project had to be “restarted” several times and different support professionals had different opinions on how to solve this problem. With the big “fire and hire” action at the university, the whole project disintegrated again. This autumn I again discussed our needs with the IT staff, but did not receive any concrete help so far.This Tuesday, I finally wanted to know how difficult it really is to connect a Windows XP machine to the network in a way that would not compromise security, but enable file distribution, backup and remote control. I went to the Institute’s garbage place where broken electronic equipment is gathered and took three old 10/100 NICs and a few ethernet cables. One card and one cable were still functioning and I dropped the NIC into a Ubuntu 16.04 computer and connected it via ethernet cable to one of the XP machines.After manually assigning an IP to the NIC and installing samba onto the Ubuntu machine, I was able to mount the samba share as a drive on the Windows XP machine. Then I just made the samba share available via a web page. All this took about one hour. Not being an IT professional, I spend maybe an additional three hours researching how to do it (samba setup, apache setup, configuration of a secondary NIC, which is not automatic on Ubuntu). This setup fulfills all of our requirements, didn’t cost anything and was implemented within one day.A write-up of the technical details will follow once I get around documenting what I did. Agility is perhaps what is mostly missing when I look at many of our university’s IT projects. Notably I think of switching to Drupal as content management system for the university’s web pages. Sadly, our faculty is still using Dreamweaver to create its web presence and as a consequence many web pages are never updated.

Mount Samba shares (why doesn't Nautilus work?) and making smb mounts permanent

Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Mount Samba sharesApparently it is very easy to connectfrom within Nautilus to Windows computers (or rather to computers running smb services). The only thing you have to do is to type smb:/// into the URL bar and the network is browsed for available domains, workgroups and services. However when one tries to open some files (e.g. some image) there often appears the error message that those files cannot be accessed via samba.What to do? I figured that when you mount smb shares, that this works correctly. In order to mount my user directory on another computer this is the command:sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=michael,password=here_goes_my_password //paula/michael /mnt/smbpaula is the netbios name of the other computer and michael is the name of the share.You can also set the owner of all the files of the mounted file system with the -o uid=owner option:sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=michael,password=here_goes_my_password -o uid=500 //paula/michael /mnt/smbIf you don’t want to type your password, you can save it in a file like this:username=susannepassword=0sdf7band then you can refer to this “credentials” file:sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=susanne,credentials=/home/susanne/.smbpasswd //patolmac217/susanne /mnt/smbIn order to unmount use:sudo umount /mnt/smbThis mostly fails as you are likely to have some open windows/terminals that keep the connection active. Close them and try again. You also might try umount -f.Making smb mounts permanentWhen you mount an SMB share, it will be gone upon system restart. To make it mount automatically during system bootup, you have to create a new entry in the /etc/fstab file. In my case e.g.://paula/michael /mnt/smb smbfs credentials=/home/jeltsch/.smbpasswd 0 0In the .smbpasswd file is my username and my password. Probably not very safe, but who cares? .smbpasswd should be anyway only readable by yourself!

No chown or chmod on samba mounts

Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I figured out (hopefully correctly) that owner, group and accession rights to files and directories on an smbmount are not changeable, not even by root. Thus you have to specify everything at mount time, e.g.:sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=jeltsch,credentials=/home/jeltsch/.smbpasswd5 -o uid=backuppc,gid=users,fmask=644,dmask=755 //patolmac217/jeltsch /mnt/jeltsch@patolmac217.hi.helsinki.fi

Samba trouble (smb, smbadduser, smbpasswd)

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If your samba is unreliable, there can be a number of reasons. I got the impression that YAST overwrites configuration data you have manually edited (e.g. in the password and user files) when you try to change settings via the YAST samba setup procedure. Here follows a checklist in case samba is again not responding or not visible in the network neighborhood. It could be that the unreliability is due to a PDC shutting down. Maybe I should make my Linux the PDC as it is always running. Anyway even if I manage to connect from W2K (using map network drive) I couldn’t connect from W98 by clicking the visible icon of my computer in the MCBL workgroup (“network path not found”). And in MacOSX my computer was not visible at all (but I could connect via the manual command “smb://128.214.186.42/homes”). Strange…In /etc/samba/smb.conf:

autofs, automount, auto.master and mounting samba shares

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

First I added a symbolic link to /etc/init.d/rc5.d/:cd /etc/init.d/rc5.d sudo ln -s ../autofs S21autofsThen I added to the /etc/auto.master the following line:/media/automounts /etc/auto.smbmountsThen I created the file auto.smbmounts with the following content:michael_msbl.helsinki.fi -fstype=smbfs,username=michael,password=## ://paula/michael Then I created the mountpoint:sudo mkdir /media/automounts/michael_msbl.helsinki.fiThen I activated the autofs daemon:sudo /etc/init.d/autofs startNow whenever one tries to access the directory /media/automounts/michael_msbl.helsinki.fi, the autofs daemon will mount the smb share automatically and unmount after a certain period of inactivity.

smb mounts via fstab or automount?

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I have many computers I need to connect to from my Linux box. Network browsing works, but is terribly slow, so I want to create some shortcuts, that I can mount with a single mouseclick what I need from a list. First I thought to modify the fstab and put there entries that would allow me to easily mount smb shares as a normal user. E.g.://paula/michael /media/smbmounts smbfs noauto,user,credentials=/home/jeltsch/.smbpasswd1 0 0This works if I have the entry mounted at system startup (without the “noauto” entry). If the “noauto” entry is present, the smb share is not mounted at system startup, but must explicitely be mounted by the following command:mount /media/smbmountsBecause of the “user” option in the fstab, every regular user should be able to do this. Not so! First I had to enable the “suid” for the smbmnt command (it appeared to be in /usr/bin/smbmnt, but was linked to a link that linked to /usr/lib/samba/classic/smbmnt:chmod +s /usr/lib/samba/classic/smbmntThen I found contradicting information whether the mountpoint (in my case /media/smbmounts) has to owned by the mounting user or not. To be safe it did:chown jeltsch /media/smbmountsStill I got an error which I couldn’t figure out and I decided to use automounts.

VMware and Samba

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

VMware can interfere with Samba. When you are running a samba server on your computer and install VMware, you might break your samba server. You can check that by:sudo /etc/init.d/smb statusIf the result is “dead” and if VMware is running its own samba server (which you can check by ps -aux and then looking for an entry like vmware-smb), then you have to rerun vmware-config.pl. In RedHat, there is an easy way to remove the vmware samba server from starting up (system Settings -> Server Settings -> Services; just stop the service and uncheck the box if you don’t want it to start up upon system boot). In Suse 9, I just re-run the vmware-config.pl script. When it asks something like: do you want vmware to set up file access to the host computer, then you should say no.

What nfs and smb shares are available on a server (showmount, smbclient)?

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The command to figure out what shares are available e.g. on the computer 192.168.0.2 type:For nfs: /usr/sbin/showmount -e 192.168.0.2For samba: smbclient -L 192.168.0.2

Windows NT, network browsing, mounting and disconnecting from network drives (command netuse)

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Network browsing in Windows is a mystery. Sometimes some computers simply don’t show up when browsing a network. This seems to be especially true for Linux servers. Under newer versions of the Windows OS (2000, XP), you can connect to a server (if you know its IP adress) via the mount network drive command even though the network browser cannot see that server. Windows NT doesn’t have that option. The only possibility is to use the “net use” command from the command line. This is uncomfortable, although one can make .bat files for frequently used connections. The command is: net use * \\ip-adress\username The asterisk assings the share to the next available drive letter (of course you can assign manually to e.g. H:). To delete this specific network drive type: net use H: /delete Actually, even if you can browse and connect without needing the command line, you need the command line always when you want to disconnect a share from an NT server. Funnily Windows NT has no other way but to type netuse * /delete In some discussion threads it was mentioned, that one should switch on WINS support in the Linux server’s smb.conf file wins support = Yes. If you connect to Linux, make sure that Samba is running and that the user to whose home folder you want to connect to has an entry & password in the smb database (this is NOT preconfigured even in Suse 9.2): as root: smbpasswd -a username It didn’t help me, though. MacOS X computers (10.3) show up now without problems (older MacOS X versions also had problems). Maybe I should compare the smb.conf files or just copy it over to my Suse 9.1.

smbclient (mount, Windows XP, SFS, file sharing)

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Since I always use some GUIs, I don’t really remember anymore how to connect to a Windows machine via the command line. smbclient -L windowshost shows you the shares that are available. Often, you you cannot browse them without a login/password for that windows machine, therefore you need to type smbclient -L windowshost -U username And occasionally the netbios name doesn’t work either and you need to replace it by the IP address.

Restricting Samba access on SuSE 10.1 to one IP

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

When you allow Samba access to your SuSE 10.1 machine by using the YaST firewall setup tool, three changes are made to /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2:

Hiding dot files for samba shares

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 00:00:00 +0000

To suppress the display of system files (configuration files, those that start with a dot) when connecting from a Windows computer to your samba server, write the following into the /etc/samba/smb.conf: