NFS access failed with SAMBA/CIFS mount from Windows 2003 SP1

[Rick Braman]

Hi,

I'm running a K460 with HP-UX 11.11 and run SAMBA/CIFS to mount shares from our local Windows 2003 servers. This has worked smooth as silk for us... until yesterday.

We have a need to mount a new share onto our UNIX server, but this time the share is on a Windows 2003 server with SP1 (Service Pack 1).

The share mounts just fine, is 'rwxrwxrwx', and is viewable and writable by anyone with a root or root privilaged user account. However a regular user does not even see the mountpoint, let alone the mount itself. They see the 'empty' mountpoint when the share is unmounted, but it completely disappears and displays the following error when it is mounted:

$ ll
./rsfold not found
total 326
[directory listing omitted]

$ cd /rsfold
NFS access failed for server p2server01: RPC: Remote system error
ksh: /rsfold: bad directory

None of our other Windows 2003 servers have this service pack installed, and the shares mount and are fully accessable to any user on UNIX without a problem.

Is there something special either I need to do on the SAMBA/CIFS side, or is there something on the Windows 2003 side that needs to be addressed because of the SP1?

Thanks in advance!

[Ivan Ferreira]

This could be because 2003 SP1 requires SMB signing. You probably need a NEW version of SAMBA/CIFS. Or you may try disabling SMB signing:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;811497&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

[Eric Raeburn]

Hello, Rick,

This is Eric in the hp cifsclient lab. It is unclear which software you are using on hp-ux to mount and access the Windows server. Is it the smbclient provided with Samba (the HP CIFS Server B8725AA), or the HP CIFS Client (B8724AA)? They are two very different beasts. What command(s) do you use to mount the shares on the Windows system, and what version of the software are you using?

Without knowing the answers, I will venture a guess as to what the problem might be. It looks to me like you may have mounted the share with the CIFS Client, but the non-root users have not logged in. The normal sequence of events is for root to perform the mount (either via cifsmount or mount(1M)--only root can do this), and then for non-root users to use the cifslogin command to authenticate themselves to the server. With the CIFS Client (unlike NFS), users must explicitly log in to each server before they can access any of its mounted directories (just as Windows users must provide their passwords when they map local drives to remote shares). The situation you describe is exactly consistent with what we would see if root has mounted the share and provided a password in the process, but no other users have logged in.

There is a lot of information about these procedures, including methods for auto-login (where explicit login can be circumvented) in the CIFS Client Admin Guide, chapters 2 & 3, here: http://www.docs.hp.com/en/B8724-90079/B8724-90079.pdf

Please post your replies to my questions above, and whether my guess solved the problem. Note that we are on holiday through 7/4, and I will be on vacation 7/5 and possibly 7/6. If you need direct assistance before then, please place a support call with HP.

Regards,
-Eric

[Eric Raeburn]

P.S. I don't think SMB packet signing is the culprit. It's a good theory, but, you state that root can view and write to the share. If signing were the problem, then no one would be able to access the share.

[Jim Keeble]

Hi Rick,

I've seen something similar to this when users did not have access to the local mountpoint, ie., /rsfold before the CIFS mount is done. It's just a wild guess really, but I remember that it was not very obvious because the permissions looked fine after the remote share was mounted.

Good luck, hope this helps.