Comment 2 for bug 305454

Seconded. I'm also running Ubuntu 8.10 (with smbclient version 3.2.3) and experienced a similar problem recently. I have three entries like the following (accessing different folders on the server) in my fstab:

//helios/public /media/helios-public cifs defaults,noatime,auto 0 0

Previously this worked fine, now I get some very strange behaviour. With the line above, I get a password request, and then, regardless of what I type:

mount error 13 = Permission denied
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)

I tried adding the guest option:

//helios/public /media/helios-public cifs defaults,noatime,auto,guest 0 0

This doesn't ask for a password, as expected, but returns the same error. Not to be defeated, I tried adding a username instead:

//helios/public /media/helios-public cifs defaults,noatime,auto,username=guest 0 0

This asks for a password as before, yet bizarrely it accepts whatever I type and mounts the share. So my temporary fix is to add the password option to my fstab with a random word:

//helios/public /media/helios-public cifs defaults,noatime,auto,username=guest,password=foo 0 0

Now my shares are mounted fine without user input, even though both the username and password do not exist. This seems to work fine as a temporary fix for unprotected shares.