enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[Bolesław Tokarski <boleslaw.tokarski@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, David,

I admit the problem is not very straightforward and I faced a number of 
similar issues, but I never needed to provide a solution for the whole 
company.

> I was wondering how you all mount network drives in Ubuntu. Let me 
> start by defining what I mean.
>
>  1. Mount on (ldap, AD, etc) user login automatically
>  2. No password re-entry
>  3. Reconnect if network drops or not available on boot
>  4. Must have a real mount point that isn't only ~/.gvfs/foo as some
>     applications won't let the user browse here without actually going
>     to the hidden folder

GVFS is actually very convenient for most basic cases. I used to make a 
symlink to the hidden directory. Would that suffice?

> I also happen to use smb, but I don't think that matters.

It does. This actually means that if you use Kerberos in the PAM stack 
(or as part of, say, SSSD or samba), the user has a valid Kerberos 
ticket that you can use to solve #2. Though, you can do the same with NFSv4.

> I currently use pam_mount but it has a few issues with number 3. Under 
> normal circumstances it will reconnect. However if the network is not 
> available on boot pam_mount fails and gives up. This can happen on a 
> fast solid state hard drive computer where lightdm starts before 
> networking is up. It can also happen if networking in just unavailable 
> for whatever reason on boot (laptop turned on out of office, etc).

Noted. I never tried that one.

> Is there anything better out there? Autofs? Custom scripts?

I guess autofs which mounts a share with a Kerberos ticket would do. 
Although it does not do it on log in, but on first attempt, but I guess 
it is not a problem.

Although the login race condition still applies - if the user logs in 
using cached credentials, he would not have the Kerberos ticket, but I 
saw in Ubuntu 12.10 that in these cases there is a pop-up that an online 
account needs attention.

> Lastly is anyone doing similar things to Windows Offline Files?
Unfortunately not.
> David Burke
> davidmburke.com <http://davidmburke.com>
By the way, good blog, especially the AD part. Although I would not 
agree that Likewise is any good (at least in the free version), you 
mentioned a number of points that I did not approach.

Cheers,
Ballock