Hello,
1) problem with high UID's, we have UIDs >> 65535 and the mounted samba shares do not get proper permissions
Haven't been a problem for a couple of years, as far as I can gather, definitely shouldn't be for Samba 3. Changed rather shortly after kernel 2.4 appeared supporting UiDs > 65535. Haven't tested this myself, just did a quick google just now.
Well. Take a look at https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1234 . If I understand it correctly, there are still many programs which use __kernel_uid_t instead of uid_t or __kernel_uid32_t. I agree -- it should not be a problem. But it is.
2) is it true that Samba does not support special files (like sockets), thus rendering this file system unusable for the purpose of mounting home directories to use e.g. with KDE (which needs to create sockets)?
Not true. 'Unix extension = yes' in smb.conf solves this, the problem with KDE is that it has odd (':' in particular) characters in filenames, this is solved by also setting 'mangled names = no'. Gnome, on the other hand, uses a file locking strategy which is broken with sambamount. Setting an environment variable GCONF_LOCAL_LOCKS=1 for the user moves the file locking to /tmp and makes Gnome useable, though the solution isn't optimal.
Thanks! That are good news for us. And what about directories exported from Windows?
Am I wrong? What other possibilities are there?
Someone suggested VPN, which can force the user to authenticate to get an IP address - at which point IP security all of a sudden deserves to contain the word "security" in it.
:-) OTOH -- as far as I understand, VPN encrypts the whole private network traffic, which may or may not be a problem in terms of performance. I have played now with shfs for a couple of days. Well, the code is maybe not very mature (I had to correct the high UID issue here as well), and the performance remains to be tested, but at least for some purposes it is really great, and it is by far the easiest solution to configure and use. And the really nice thing about is that you do not need to configure or install anything on the server side.
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