On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 22:32:35 -0800
"Aaron J. Grier" <agrier@poofygoof.com> wrote:
> that's the trick; I'd like to avoid storing cleartext passwords and
> passing them on the command line in order to mount smb shares...

I used .nsmbrc for my effort: I agree that you don't want a
password on the command line.

That doesn't give you an encrypted key storage or the like,
though, but you can put tight restrictions on read access to the
file, just like .netrc (which is usually 0400).

Ultimately, it is this authentication issue that shows up the
model mis-match between Unix file system mounts and Windows ones:
windows are per-user, and Unix is per-system with user
authentication taken to be consistent (or something: as far as I
can tell, network file system access control is still a mess on
Unix if you have any kind of heterogeneous mix of security
domains.)  The gnome-vfs mechanism seems to work better
(for some values of better), but it's limited to the GNOME
applications that use the right user-space APIs, I think.  That
is, the file browser windows work fine, and they hand
applications file names like "smb://machine/share/file.foo" which
they seem to understand.  At no stage does the remote file system
actually get mounted into the Unix file system name space the way
mount_smbfs does.  That means that regular command-line
applications or utilities don't get to see those files.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew