Comment 27 for bug 210741

Since I have not seen any new posts on this thread for some months, I would like to confirm the problems mentioned in the earlier bug reports:

1) After the upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 I cannot access the files on a samba server any longer.
   When I try to mount the samba share by the following command line
   "smbmount //SERVER/share /mnt/localmountpoint -o rw,username=my_username"
   I get a "permission denied" error. I have been using this command for several years. I rechecked
   the permissions of /mnt/localmountpoint and they are ok.

   The server runs an older version of samba (2.x) with "security = user" and plaintext
   authentication. I cannot provide the exact configuration of this server because it is
   not administered by me.

2) All files on the server are still fully accessible when I use "smbclient //SERVER/share".

3) When I tweak the SecurityFlags (as described in the readme file of the cifs kernel module) by
   "echo 0x37 > /proc/fs/cifs/SecurityFlags", I can mount the samba share by "smbmount".
   After that I can see the files on the server, but I have no access to them (cannot
   read/write/create files, although the file permission listed by "ls -al" are ok).

I have setup a minimal samba server on my box and found that the current cifs implementatation
in the kernel has great difficulties when connecting to a samba server which requires plain text
authentication (that is setting "encrypt passwords = no" in "smb.conf"). So far I have not been
successful in mounting any share on this test server as long as it runs with the
"encrypt passwords = no"-setting (I always got permission denied errors, tweaking the SecurityFlags
had no effect). Everything worked fine when I turned on password encryption.

When looking at the kernel source of the cifs module I could not find any code that would send
passwords in plaintext to the samba server. There seems to be always some encryption taking place.
The same issue is also discussed on
http://www.nabble.com/No-connection-using-plain-text-password-td18611280.html
where Bart Oldeman suggests a patch, which adds code for handling plain text authentication
to the cifs module (http://lists.samba.org/archive/linux-cifs-client/2008-March/002815.html)

Applying this patch and recompiling the cifs module resolved the problems (at least for me).

I would be glad if the patch could be approved by the developers of cifs kernel module. If
possible a corrected version of the kernel should distributed by Ubuntu soon. Not being able
to mount samba shares seems to be an annoying problem for quite many users of Ubuntu 8.04.