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 and above.

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


INSTALLATION

For using smbfs, I _strongly_ suggest to upgrade to Linux kernel
2.0.27 or later. If 2.0.28 has been released, please use that. While
2.0.27 is the latest kernel, please apply the patch in
smbfs-2.0.27-diff. It fixes a bug in smbfs that might hang your
machine if a smb server has been switched off, along with 2 oopses.

Please note that this program is kernel code, and thus can crash your
machine. I cannot take any warranty for this software.


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.

Some people have reported that smbfs does not work with DEC Pathworks.
I do not have access to such a machine, so I cannot do anything about
this. It would be very helpful if someone could use a packet sniffer to
trace the things that go over the net when a commercial client connects
to a Pathworks server. Maybe I can duplicate its behaviour.


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}"
