Re: smbfs works!

Bill Hawes (whawes@star.net)
Sat, 06 Dec 1997 17:20:15 -0500


Steven N. Hirsch wrote:
> I guess the third, err, tenth time is the charm here. File dates now work
> correctly on WfW 3.11 shares. I also tested against my Alpha UDB running
> NT Workstation 4.0 with no problems. Quite a battle, but you won <g>.

Almost anyway ... the current version doesn't support 'touch' on
directories, since I'm trying to open in write mode. I've changed it
once again and have it working on NT, hopefully on Win 95. (WfW should
be unaffected.)

> It would be lovely if smbclient could have an alternate personality when
> invoked by the name 'smbmount'. By looking at argv[0], it could
> switch to a functional emulation of the older smbmount utility. This
> would be far less confusing to the novice user, and make automounter maps
> quite a bit simpler.

Volker had some good ideas for improving mounting, including trying to
incorporate it into the mainstream mount. He's too busy right now to
work on it, but maybe somebody else could pick it up. I agree the
mounting needs to be made much more convenient.

> As you can see, the child shell process gets confused when started in a
> directory where (I surmise) smbfs is translating my 'cd' parameters to
> upper-case. This also occurs under NT when I enter an uppercase directory
> using a lower-case alias.
>
> Not sure if anything can be done about this, but thought I'd mention it.
> As a point of reference, the smbfs support in 2.0.x kernels mapped
> everything under FAT filesystems to lower case (which I think looks
> better). However, given the Win95 and NT support for long file names and
> mixed case, there doesn't seem to be a clear win..

Not sure what exactly is going wrong there, but changing case can cause
problems. Smbfs still has code in place for mapping names to upper or
lower after a directory listing, but I'm not sure how the options get
enabled. It might have been lost in the transition to the new mount
utilities.

Regards,
Bill