So in reference to getting Pydio working on a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine with IIS 8.5 I found that I wanted a workspace in Pydio to access a existing share on a 2012 R2 file server. I have a lot of files I don’t want duplicated on both servers. Now there are many workspace drivers available but since Pydio was designed originally for a *nix system the main way to access a Windows server is through Samba. Windows Server supports SMB, server message blocks, for file sharing among other things. Now on a *nix system you can just install Samba and then Pydio can use the Samba client to remotely access the Windows server. Problem is I want to use Samba on a Windows server to access another Windows server. So I started a hunt to find a ported version of the Samba client and it resulted in two pages out of the millions out there: https://smithii.com/samba which had ported all of Samba v3.0.23 over and https://www.leepa.io/lpackham/smbclient/ which had ported just the v3.0.7 client. So I started testing these clients and long story short they have issues with Windows servers. Mainly you can get directory listings using them and even pull files but you cannot create files nor push files to the Windows file server. After some research its due to changes, mainly security related, in the Windows servers SMB implementation….changes that were fixed in newer versions of Samba (https://www.samba.org/).
Smb-scripts is a collection of Bash Scripts that uses Samba and LDAP Client commands. These scripts are used by Samba to manage it using Microsoft Tools (like usrmgr and svrmgr) and a LDAP database as information repository. The SMB client does not include the ability to print by means of SMB or the ability to access SMB resources other than files and directories. For more information about how to use the SMB client to access shares, see Chapter 4, Using SMB File Sharing on Client Systems, and the mountsmbfs (1M), smbadm (1M), smb (4), pamsmbfslogin (5. Nov 29, 2000 The smbclient command is a multifunctional tool that acts (among other things) as an FTP-like client for Samba. This tool can be quite handy when all else fails. The biggest drawback is when you. The SMB client is implemented as a set of kernel drivers – MrxSMB, NetBT, LanmanWorkstation, possibly others. There also are built-in WebDAV, NFS, NetWare clients; net use relies on the kernel to pick the right one. – user1686 Sep 24 '12 at 19:09. $ yum -y install samba samba-client cifs-utils Note: It’s recommended to install the samba server software on all samba clients. Then we create our mount point: $ mkdir -p /mnt/backups Then we create a group that mirrors the same group that existing on the samba server: $ groupadd -gid 2000 sambagroup Now we need to add members to that group.
So I determined that the only possible way to get my Pydio install to access my existing Windows file server was to either use the FTP over SSH plugin and enable this on my file server, which I didn’t want to do, or figure out a way to compile the Samba client using the latest source. After lots of trail and error I was able to partially compile Samba 3.6.25 using Cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/) but where it failed was after it had built the smbclient.exe that I needed. I took the client and copied it to the server and tried running it from a command prompt and it complained about needing some Cygwin DLL files which was expected. I copied over the DLL files it needed to the server and was able to connect to the file server. I then updated Pydio to use my newly compiled smbclient.exe and Pydio now works as expected allowing e to share out a existing share from another server. The best part is since user credentials are passed through the existing NTFS permissions still apply on top of Pydios own permission checks.
Not sure if anyone in the world will ever need it but just in case here it is: smbclient.zip. Keep in mind you will need to install Cygwin on the same machine and at the very least copy the DLL files it needs out of C:cygwinbin to the directory with the client.
I realize this is not a very exciting post, especially compared to my other wonderful musing on this site, but I felt I really had to write it to share the pain!
A colleague I work with needed to enable this feature on an Azure Windows Server 2019 machine to communicate with some old system that only supports Server Message Block version 1 (SMB1). Easy enough to add that right?
Trying the installation
Let’s first get some information about the feature:
The output:
Notice the State property? The feature is disabled and the payload (installation files) are not on the Azure virtual machine.
When you try to install the feature, you get:
I guess I need the Windows Server 2019 sources!
Downloading Windows Server 2019
I downloaded Windows Server 2019 (November 2019 version) from https://my.visualstudio.com/Downloads?q=SQL%20Server%202019. I am not sure if you can use the evaluation version of Windows Server 2019 because I did not try that. I downloaded the ISO to the Azure virtual machine.
Mount ISO and copy install.wim
On recent versions of Windows, you can right click an ISO and mount it. In the mounted ISO, search for install.wim and copy that file to a folder on your C: disk like c:wim. Under c:wim, create a folder called mount and run the following command:
The contents of install.wim is now available in c:wimmount. Now don’t try to enable the feature by pointing to the sources with the -source parameter of Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature. It will not work yet!
Patch the mounted files
The Azure Windows Server 2019 image (at time of writing, June 2020) has a cumulative update installed: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4551853/windows-10-update-kb4551853. For this installatin to work, I needed to download the update from https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/home.aspx and put it somewhere like c:patches.
Now we can update the mounted files offline with the following command:
Smb Client Linux
It will take a while to update! You need to do this because the files mounted from the downloaded ISO do not match the version of the Windows Server 2019 image. Without this update, the installation of the SMB1 feature will not succeed.
Enable the SMB1 feature
Smb Clients Meaning
Now we can enable the feature with the following command:
You will need to reboot. After rebooting, from a PowerShell prompt run the command below to check the installation:
Smb Client Ios
The State property should say: Enabled
Conclusion
Smb Client Software
Something this trivial took me way too long. Is there a simpler way? Let me know! 👍
And by the way, don’t enable SMB1. It’s not secure at all. But in some cases, there’s just no way around it.