[Pkg-samba-maint] SMBFS Trouble with 3.0.27-1

[Steve Langasek]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 06:18:53PM -1000, Peter Besenbruch wrote:
> On Sunday 18 November 2007 17:36:45 Steve Langasek wrote:
> > > Thank you. Now I have to try to learn CIFS and see if I can make it work
> > > with Windows 98. Will look for 3.0.27a.

> > Er?  cifs is a replacement for smbfs, which is a Linux-specific kernel
> > client.  That has nothing to do with Windows 98.

> It's a long story involving Fedora 5, Debian, and Windows 98. Fedora 5 was the 
> first distro that eliminated SMBFS, and it caused all kinds of trouble with 
> the very simplified Debian Samba I had set up, and Windows 98 flat out 
> refused to see the Fedora machine. The Fedora message boards were full of 
> messages bemoaning the lack of smbmount, incompatibilities, and old Windows 
> woes. The posters blamed CIFS.

If this means that CIFS can't successfully be used to mount shares provided
by a Windows 98 "server", that's a possibility, and one I can't confirm or
deny because I haven't had Win98 on hand for about 4 years now.  If it's
supposed to mean that CIFS prevents Win98 clients from talking to Samba,
then it's ignorant blamestorming.  I'm afraid I don't know which applies,
because I haven't succeeded in finding the messages you refer to.

In any case, Samba in lenny will generally no longer play well with Windows
98 out of the box, because in addition to dropping smbfs in favor of cifs in
the Debian packages, Samba 3.2 will change the default authentication
options to reject any authentication weaker than NTLM, which means by
default it won't talk to Win98 as either a client or a server.  If you're
still stuck running Win98 somewhere these days, I'd suggest upgrading it to
Debian... ;)

But seriously, if that's not an option and you find that cifs doesn't work
as a client against Win98 servers, that is a bug and one that should be
straightforward to fix if we know what's happening since Win98 is the
simplest of the servers to talk to.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon at debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/