This is the user utilities package for the Linux SMB client
filesystem.

With smbfs you can mount drives exported by Windows for Workgroups,
Lan Manager, Windows NT or compatible systems running tcp/ip. smbfs is
usable with Linux kernels 1.2 and above. For safe usage of smbfs, I
strongly recommend to use Linux 2.0.28 and above.

For the latest versions of smbfs & co., you might want to look at
http://www.kki.org/linux-lan/.

In release 2.0.0 of smbfs, I removed the kernel module for Linux
1.2.x. If you are still using 1.2.x, please get smbfs-0.10 from
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/smbfs.


INSTALLATION

For using smbfs, I _strongly_ suggest to upgrade to Linux kernel
2.0.28. It fixes bugs in smbfs that severely affect the stability of
your machine. To use smbfs, you have to enable it when you configure
your kernel. If you have Windows 95 machines to connect to, please
enable the switch in the configuration when you are asked for it. It
slows down the listing of directories, to give Windows 95 a chance to
answer the requests. If you will never connect to Windows 95, you can
disable the option.

smbfs is an on-going effort. When I find bugs that affect the
machine's stability, then I send the fixes to Linus. But there are
others that fix problems with specific servers. I regard these as low
priority fixes, which are not immediately sent to Linus. I will
release them together with the smbfs packages. The patches are
distributed as smbfs-2.0.xx-y.diff. Please do the following steps
before configuring and building your kernel. Please always use a
fresh, unpatched 2.0.28 source tree.

cd /usr/src/linux
patch -p1 </path/to/smbfs/smbfs-2.0.xx-y.diff

After this, you can build your kernel.

To compile and install the smbfs utilities smbmount and smbumount,
please do a

make
make install

in the directory you find this README in. To do the make install, you
have to be root. Please note that smbmount and smbumount are installed
setuid root to allow normal users to mount their own shares.


LIMITATIONS

The limitations smbfs has are the natural limitations of the SMB
protocol, which was designed with MS-DOS based PCs in mind. The first
limitation is the lack of uid, gid and permission information per
file. You have to assign those values once for a complete mounted
directory.

The second limitation is just as annoying as the first: You cannot
re-export a smb-mounted directory by nfs. It is not possible because
the NFS protocol defines access to files through unique file handles,
which can be mapped to the device and inode numbers in unix NFS
servers. SMB does not have unique numbers per file, you only have the
path name. I implemented a caching scheme for inode numbers, which
gives unique inode numbers for every open file in the system. This is
just sufficient for local use of the files, because you can tell when
an inode number can be discarded. With NFS the situation is
different. You can never know when the client will access the file-id
you offered, so you would have to cache the inode numbers
indefinitely long. I think this should not be done in kernel mode, as
it would require an unlimited amount of RAM.


AUTOMOUNTING

I received the following amd map file entries from Andrew Tridgell:

laplandc type:=program;mount:="/sbin/smbmount smbmount //lapland/c ${fs} -P XXXX -u 148";unmount:="/sbin/umount umount ${fs}"

laplandd type:=program;mount:="/sbin/smbmount smbmount //lapland/d ${fs} -P XXXX -u 148";unmount:="/sbin/umount umount ${fs}"