mc lacks SMB support in Ubuntu 10.04, 12.04, 14.04, 16.04

[Michael Fritscher]

Binary package hint: mc

Ubuntu 10.04, 12.04, 14.04, 16.04 versions of mc are missing support for smbfs (compiled without --enable-vfs-smb ).

[Christoph Shipley (champro)]

Confirmed bug by showing mc -V from 8.04 and 8.10.

8.04
GNU Midnight Commander 4.6.1
Virtual File System: tarfs, extfs, cpiofs, ftpfs, fish, smbfs
With builtin Editor
Using system-installed S-Lang library with terminfo database
With subshell support as default
With support for background operations
With mouse support on xterm and Linux console
With internationalization support
With multiple codepages support

8.10
GNU Midnight Commander 4.6.2-pre1
Virtual File System: tarfs, extfs, cpiofs, ftpfs, fish
With builtin Editor
Using system-installed S-Lang library with terminfo database
With subshell support as default
With support for background operations
With mouse support on xterm and Linux console
With internationalization support
With multiple codepages support
Data types: char 8 int 32 long 32 void * 32 off_t 64 ecs_char 8

[Christoph Shipley (champro)]

Confirmed bug by showing mc -V from 8.04 and 8.10. See comment.

[Stas Sușcov (sushkov)]

Subscribing!

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

added debian upstream, apparently this was removed due to a security hole, and will be re-enabled when the hole is closed...

[Yury V. Zaytsev (zyv)]

This will be reenabled in Debian as the smb layer in mc gonna get rewritten.

[Christoph Shipley (champro)]

Apparently, they don't plan on closing the hole, just removing the feature altogether.

Changelog from mc (3:4.7.0-1)
http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/m/mc/mc_4.7.0.1-2/changelog
"Fix misleading description of mc and mc-dbg: SMB protocol is not further possible with mc, due to security issues."

[Yury V. Zaytsev (zyv)]

If you read the post above yours, you will find out that the re-implementation of this feature is planned, however feel free to contribute the patches that fix the outstanding security issues in the smb layer if you want the old implementation back before this happens.

[Alexey Mentat (mentatxx)]

Can you give URL of security hole description ?

[Yury V. Zaytsev (zyv)]

Basically all the CVE's that apply to Samba 2.0.4a:

http://www.samba.org/samba/history/security.html

What in fact triggered the takedown of the smb support is a couple of other bugs (like nslookups floods) which are not going to be fixed:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=451964

In fact, smb support is unnecessary, because you should be using smbnetfs, but for the rare cases when it is indeed handy, one should link dynamically against the latest current Samba library.

The problem is that nobody has time or/and is interested to provide a patch for this. If you do I will take care of bringing it to upstreams attention.

[Yury V. Zaytsev (zyv)]

The fix is NOT released and there won't be a fix until samba support is rewritten, which is under way right now.

[Lenin (gagarin)]

And what's going on now, two years later?

[Yury V. Zaytsev (zyv)]

It's still being worked on...

[CSRedRat (csredrat)]

when be added support smbfs?

[Yury V. Zaytsev (zyv)]

The upstream bug report URL is as follows:

https://www.midnight-commander.org/ticket/1

The last activity in the corresponding branch was something like 2 years ago. So, the answer is: nobody can tell you.

If you can finish the branch, clean it up, and rebase against the current master, get it reviewed and merged, then you will find out.