cifsmount error

[andykrull]

Hello, we have been playing around with cifs and liking the results. One issue we've noticed is that the mounted object seems to have a string limit of what can be displayed in cifslist. Can anyone else confirm that?

This tends to limit you to mounting folders higher up on the foreign server.

Second question is if there is a way to make cifslogin global rather than user specific. We've tried root, but that is specific to root only. It would be nice to have this behave system wide.

Thanks for any guidence.

Andy

[Matti_Kurkela]

> ...mounted object seems to have a string limit of what can be displayed in cifslist. Can anyone else confirm that?
This tends to limit you to mounting folders higher up on the foreign server.

I don't see what you mean.

When a filesystem is shared using CIFS, a share name is defined. If you share /a/very/long/filesystem/path as "sharename" on a server, you refer to it simply as \\server\sharename on the client.

> Second question is if there is a way to make cifslogin global rather than user specific.

What exactly do you wish to happen?

Depending on your needs and your current set-up, you may have to use autofs in conjunction with CIFS to get what you want.

As the CIFS protocol was originally designed for Windows use, it has a built-in expectation that the client host is a single-user workstation.

CIFS requires the user of the filesystem to authenticate to the server at mount time. All the operations done to the mounted filesystem are then associated with this authenticated identity. This causes certain difficulties in arranging "global" CIFS mounts. I guess the Unix extensions to the CIFS protocol might offer workarounds to the protocol limitations... but only if the server supports the extensions too.

MK