[lug] Samba mounting issues

[Ferdinand Schmid]

HI,

For the past few days I have been struggling with Samba 3.0's smbmount 
command.  Here is my problem:

I have a server that exports a large file system via samba for Windows 
clients.  We have some software that resides on Linux machines for executing 
simulations.  These Linux crunchers should also mount the samba share.  The 
reason to not use nfs is that the simulation software converts all file and 
path names to lower case - and since it is binary distributed commercial 
software I can't change that.

My crunchers can properly access the samba share using konqueror using 
smb://server/share urls.  However, I cannot mount the samba share using 
smbmount.  The mounting process hangs (times out).  Here are some syslog 
entries:

kernel: smb_add_request: request [000001000006edc0, mid=0] timed out!

I also get a warning that the smbfs kernel module is not supported by SuSE - 
but the module loads properly.  The problem is consistent between 64bit and 
32bit systems.  Kernel is 2.6.8-24.11 (current SuSE) and Samba versions 
samba-3.0.9-2.3 and samba-client-3.0.11rc1-0.1 were tested.  

The samba web site states that the smbfs kernel module is deprecated and 
cifsfs should be used - but I did not find much documentation on how to do 
this.  Apparently smbmount still uses the smbfs km to do its job - and it now 
fails consistently on all of my 2.6 kernel based systems.

If I could mount file systems using nfs case insensitive then I would also be 
happy for now.  However, all of the case insensitive nfs stuff appears to 
relate to Microsoft services for Unix, Sun's equivalent, ...  It is of no use 
to me.

Any help or ideas are much appreciated,
Ferdinand

-- 
Ferdinand Schmid
Architectural Energy Corporation
Celebrating over 20 Years of Improving Building Energy Performance
http://www.archenergy.com