Unmet dependencies or better documentation needed

[Jason Doller]

The autofs package seems to rely on samba-common when trying to mount smb shares. This was pretty obvious, although some documentation would have been nice. A bigger problem is that is also relies on smbclient, which is far less obvious, and should be clearly documented somewhere.

The auto.smb file mentions that "smbclient -L" is needed to obtain a list of shares, but doesn't specify that:
a. It isn't installed by default, or
b. It's needed even if you don't plan on browsing shares.

I would recommend adding this in caps near the top of the auto.smb file:

# PLEASE INSTALL THE smbclient PACKAGE TO USE SMB SHARES WITH AUTOFS. YOU CAN DO THIS BY RUNNING
# sudo apt install smbclient.

You may be good if you don't use caps as long as you put it near the top of the file.

BONUS POINTS if you get autofs/automount to display meaningful error messages. Even with -d it didn't mention smbclient.

A final thing, since you're here. Autofs does not work with smb mounts the way it does with, say, nfs. The auto.smb script works just fine after you install the dependencies, but a map file with mount options fails every time. This is what I used (note, credentials are the same as for the auto.smb script):

auto.master:
/mnt/medianas /etc/auto.smb.medianas --timeout=600 --ghost

auto.smb.medianas:
media01 -fstype=cifs,ro,vers=2.0,credentials=/etc/creds/medianas ://medianas/Media01/
media02 -fstype=cifs,ro,vers=2.0,credentials=/etc/creds/medianas ://10.168.2.51/Media02/

Automount startup includes:
master_do_mount: mounting /mnt/medianas
automount_path_to_fifo: fifo name /var/run/autofs.fifo-mnt-medianas
lookup_nss_read_map: reading map file /etc/auto.smb.medianas
do_init: parse(sun): init gathered global options: (null)
mounted indirect on /mnt/medianas with timeouts disabled
st_ready: st_ready(): state = 0 path /mnt/medianas

Error from automount:
handle_packet: type = 3
handle_packet_missing_indirect: token 98, name media01, request pid 11908
attempting to mount entry /mnt/medianas/media01
lookup_mount: lookup(program): looking up media01
lookup(program): lookup for media01 failed
dev_ioctl_send_fail: token = 98
failed to mount /mnt/medianas/media01
handle_packet: type = 3
handle_packet_missing_indirect: token 99, name media01, request pid 11908
dev_ioctl_send_fail: token = 99

In any case, thanks, and I hope this helps.

[Mitchell Dzurick (mitchdz)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug Jason!

What version of Ubuntu are you seeing this issue on?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for autofs (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]