Mounting an SMB share on Solaris.

[reddragdiva]

I'm trying to mount an SMB share on Solaris. (I know it can't be done, I just want to bitch a while.) This is so hard they're only just working on the feature in Solaris 10 (per the candid discussions from the OS developers on the OpenSolaris boards).

The suggested workaround is to export the share over NFS via Services for Unix on the NT box in question. This is what we're doing now, it combines the reliability of Windows with the user-friendliness of Unix — the NFS share just ... disappears from time to time and must be recreated by hand — and we're desperately after another way. Future scripts will use smbclient instead, which works very nicely, but we have lots of old scripts around and a systems programmer reluctant to embark on a major conversion exercise. (Same reason we can't just serve the share from a Unix box via Samba instead. Assume the SMB share can't be moved. We don't have any control over the box in question either.)

There's a proprietary commercial third-party solution called Sharity (which makes the SMB share available internally as if it's been mounted via NFS), which is the consensus real answer to the problem and which we're not going to use because it costs money. There's an ancient GPL version called Sharity Light, which does in fact compile and try to work on Solaris 8, but gives the following error, which Google is no help with any part of:

# ./shlight //debtors/ash/ /mnt -n
Kernel: smb_receive_raw: Invalid packet 0x83
Kernel: smb_receive: receive error: -5
Kernel: smb_proc_connect: Failed to send SESSION REQUEST.
error connecting to server: [5] I/O error
#

Error 5 is (I think) "no such share", but I know damn well the shares I've tested it on exist. Huh?

I'm this > < close to just finding a semi-discarded PC, installing Debian and mounting the share on that for export via NFS, which would actually be cheaper than Sharity. As well as utterly ridiculous.

Comments

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

Use Debilian! See the light!

[reddragdiva]

It looks like an oncoming train. Loaded with gnus.

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

Lee-GNU-cks! eleventy-one!

(Sorry, but I've had way too much exposure to Deadrat today.)

[reddragdiva]

I've just been reading up on DTrace. It sounds good enough for me to bother setting up a box running Solaris 10. Also, there's a FreeBSD port in progress. Which will be ready before L*n*x has anything of the sort. Bwaaahaha.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

> I know it can't be done,

There is a commercial product which does this. Oh - you've found it already. We used Sharity at our last place.

I vote for the extra PC :-)

[sweh.livejournal.com]

./shlight //debtors/ash/ /mnt -n

Get rid of the / after "ash" and see if that works.

[reddragdiva]

Nope, exact same error message!

[simonb.livejournal.com]

I played with sharity-light a while ago whilst trying to do exactly the same thing and although I got it to sort of work - as in it mounted SMB mounts with no problems and made the files available - it was highly unstable and prone to failure if a gnat farted within a ten mile radius of the box running the software.

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

In other words it's every bit as reliable as NT.

[simonb.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'd say that it was worse...

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

/me rereads Can Such Things Be by Ambrose Bierce

[xandraius.livejournal.com]

Holy smouldering monkey poo... worse than a Wintel flavor?
Fsck.
BTW David, any special tweaks on the Neanderthal Technology box? With changes to the *spontaneous undocumnted product features* of Winblow$ XP from 2K, I think that SMB on NT is now tied to using port 443, even if you skip all of the NetBIOS protcol installs. I could be wrong but remember reading that.

[reddragdiva]

I have no idea. The other practical problem is that the box in question is not in our control at all.

(If I can beat sharity-light into working — which, so far, I can't — it would be pathetically easy to, e.g., set up something to restart it in case of a gnat farting within a ten-mile radius of it. Simply because we control the Unix boxes.)

[ozjester.livejournal.com]

You've missed all this work stuff haven't you?

[reddragdiva]

I'm suddenly DRASTICALLY time-poor, but it's very nice to know I actually have an income to come in rather than continuing to skim off the house money ...

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Just wait until I start as a PFY. We can bitch together about our lusers.

(I have just found out who the clients (http://www.syzygy.co.uk/default3_and_fz_menu=clients.aspx) are for the company (http://www.syzygy.net) in question. Eeep doesn't begin to describe it.)