savannah: mc's built-in samba library is out of date

[spock]

Original: ​http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?5142

Submitted by:	Michał Januszewski <spock>	Submitted on:	08 Sep 2003 14:20:05
Category:	VFS	Severity:	3 - Normal
Status:	None	Privacy:	Public
Assigned to:	None	Open/Closed:	Open
Release:	4.6.0	Operating System:	All

Original submission:

The mc's built-in samba library which is used to access data across
smb links is taken from an old samba version. This can cause 
problems since things change as time goes on. For example - current 
samba version supports something like: "interface = eth1" in 
smb.conf, the version included in mc does not. This leads to calling
 gethostname("eth1") 3 times at startup (on my box). Recently I have
 had some problems with the DNS servers I use. I had to wait 3 
minutes (!) before mc started because it tried to resolve "eth1" (2 
times ) and "ETH1" (which of course wasn't possible because of the 
DNS server failure).

I have created this patch for mc:
http://www.spock.mga.com.pl/public/gentoo/mc-4.6.0-samba.patch.bz2
(sorry to put it on an external site but since it's almost 600kb, I 
didn't want to upload it here). It updates mc's samba libraries to 
2.2.8a. By doing so it automatically fixes another problem - namely,
 with current vesions of libcap an error (redefinition of struct 
statfs) occurs while building mc.

Comment 1 by Pavel Roskin <proski> at Mon 05 Dec 2005 02:06:15 AM UTC:

We'll have this problem as long as mc uses Samba configuration 
files. Every time Samba changes the format of its configuration 
files, mc will have to be upgraded (not just recompiled).

I see two solutions:

1) Use libsmbclient. This way, upgrading Samba will upgrade the 
client library, and mc will recognize new configuration.

2) Don't use Samba configuration files in mc. Use a separate 
configuration file or store all configuration in ~/.mc/ini

I would prefer that we at least try to use libsmbclient, and if it 
doesn't work, let's report it to Samba maintainers. This way, 
libsmbclient will be ready for mc some day.

Comment 2 by Sorin Sbarnea <sorin> at Wed 30 Jul 2008 05:56:11 PM UTC:

I wonder why this wasn't solved in 5 years. It's quite common and 
makes mc unusable. The average timeout is ~1 minute.

[slavazanko]

Related ticket #40

[slavazanko]

Related ticket #88

[metux]

My vote is to kick off the bundled lib completely and
expect it installed on the system.

[styx]

libsmbclient.h with doxygen doc

[slavazanko]

(In #273) Need to review internal SAMBA stuff (may me, will replaced by dynamic linking with libsmbclient.so). Then we need to review this ticket.

[slavazanko]

(In #273) #1619

[eventsiaarhus]

I cant download this anymore ​http://www.spock.mga.com.pl/public/gentoo/mc-4.6.0-samba.patch.bz2 ?? Where can i get it ?

David.

[slavazanko]

Created branch: 1_smbfs

Initial changeset:7a7b4c4c9011493ac88ea772676739b106980cbb

Review, please

[andrew_b]

Ticket #4288 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[birdie]

What about adding a warning that only SMB1.0 protocol is supported? This is a very fast fix for the obviously broken feature.

That will stop people from scratching their heads trying to understand why it doesn't work, e.g.

​https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/668049/how-do-i-connect-to-a-smb-samba-share-using-midnight-commander

[zaytsev]

I'd rather remove the code completely - SMB support has already been disabled in Debian for this very reason, but Fedora people have so far ignored our advice to do the same.

It's been 13 years since it has been half-broken. If somebody needs it, they should finish the branch by Slava... it's not too much work for someone who has time (see sftp VFS).

Andrew, what do you think?

[andrew_b]

Replying to zaytsev:

I'd rather remove the code completely

I agree.

[birdie]

Where's the like button?

[andrew_b]

Branch: 1_smbfs_remove
Initial changeset: 781ad4c53c5d0752108257813736bf054f60bc60

[andrew_b]

Merged to master: [6f676d06676cc5d271583754f15473af78a36ac4].

git log --pretty=oneline 30fbbe75b..6f676d066