Freebsd – Any random password results in successful login on tty

Problem solved.

Here are the actions I carried out before the problem got solved:

• sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 (in order to revert back to supported gnome packages like nautilus, ...etc)

• creating directory: /var/lib/samba and adding myself to samba passwords databse (sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/samba && sudo smbpasswd -a myusername

• sudo pam-auth-update (all the authentication modules were already selected, so I just cliked okay).

Troubleshooting here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2115288

I generally use the automount service for shares like this that I'll periodically want to mount and use. Setting this up, once you understand how, is fairly trivial.

Step #1 - setup automounting

You'll need to make sure that packages are installed. On CentOS 6 that would be autofs. Most likely other distros will use a similar name. You'll then need to create the following files:

# /etc/auto.master
/mymountpt          /etc/auto.mymountpt --timeout=600 --ghost

# /etc/auto.mymountpt
someshare                  -fstype=cifs,rw,noperm,netbiosname=${HOST},credentials=/etc/credentials.txt ://cifsserver/sharename

# /etc/credentials.txt
username=mydom\myuser
password=somepassword

You'll need to make the permissions on this last file like so:

$ sudo chmod 600 /etc/credentials.txt

You'll also need to make sure that NSS (Name Service Switch) is aware of this setup:

# /etc/nsswitch.conf
automount:  files nisplus

With these files in place you should now be able to start the autofs service.

$ sudo service autofs start

Step #2 - testing it out

Once the service has been started, you'll be able to access this path at will:

$ cd /mymountpt/someshare

The mounting of this share is now governed by autofs which will watch for 600 seconds of inactivity, at which point it will unmount the share.

This approach may seem a bit heavy handed but by doing things this way, you've alleviated your system from having to be dependent on a particular CIFS share as being available at boot. You've moved it so that it's now on demand when it's actually being used.

What to do if you don't have root login?

If you find you don't have these packages installed and aren't able to install them then your options become far fewer.

I would take a look at the Samba article in the ArchLinux Wiki, it covers other methods as well. You could also make use of FUSE to mount a variety of types of media as local directories, including SMB/CIFS. This is covered in the FUSESmb article on the Ubuntu Wiki.

References

• How to Mount a SMB/CIFS Share as an Automount on CentOS/Fedora/RHEL
• ArchLinux Wiki - Samba