[mythtv-users] OT problem with CIFS and Fedora8

[Rod Smith]

On Wednesday 14 November 2007 01:51:19 kim Gross wrote:
> I just upgraded my back end and one front end to fedora 8.  I thought
> everything was working well, until I tried to get to my videos.
>
> I use cifs to mount the storage area on my front end so I can get to the
> movies and music.  Well with the upgrade to fedora 8 from fedora 6, I am
> now getting  a permission denied error number 13.  On my fedora 6 front
> end, the exact same command line works great.
>
> Is anybody else seeing this or have any ideas what to do?
>
> Thanks
>
> [root at main /]# mount -t cifs //192.168.1.12/mythtv  -o username=mythtv
> /rstore
> Password:
> mount error 13 = Permission denied
> Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)
> [root at main /]#

I've not encountered this specific error, but I do have a few suggestions:

1) Check the Samba log file on the Samba server system. This is usually
   stored as a separate file or files in /var/log, as in /var/log/smb.log
   or a bunch of files in /var/log/samba/. You may find a clue in there,
   as in an entry about failed authentication.

2) Check the permissions on the mount point on the Samba client. It's
   conceivable there's been a change to the Samba mount tools that
   requires the mount point to be owned by whoever will own the files
   (mythtv in your case). This strikes me as a little unlikely, since
   you're running the command as root, but it's easy enough to check.

3) Try accessing the share using the smbclient program. Sometimes
   smbclient will provide different error messages, which might be
   more helpful. OTOH, it might not fail at all, which in this case
   wouldn't provide you with any information. Note that this is a
   diagnostic step; by itself, this won't solve anything.

More broadly speaking, you might want to consider switching to NFS for 
Linux-to-Linux file sharing. The SMB/CIFS protocol wasn't really designed for 
this, and although protocol updates over the years, Samba improvements, and 
the Linux cifs filesystem driver all make CIFS better for this task, NFS is 
much simpler and was designed for this task from the outset. If you need 
SMB/CIFS to share the MythTV directories with Windows systems, you can 
certainly keep it in place; it's possible to share the same directory with 
both NFS and Samba.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com