[CS-FSLUG] sudo, alternatives, configurators

[Jonathan E. Brickman]

> In my experience, SMB breaks down pretty quickly in any kind of
> environment without negligible latency (even in ones without much) as
> macrosuck apps like to make scads of small requests.
>   
Yup.  SMB doesn't do latency :-) 
> AFS has had some huge performance increases in the last couple of
> months, and works well on latent links.  It even has some support for
> windows (http://www.openafs.org/pages/windows.html), but may be overkill
> for your needs, although it may be fun if you are into that kind of
> thing.  
>
> I think you can even mount webdav within windows, but haven't played
> with it at all.
>   
I'm pretty sure you're right about WebDAV, but given that its support is 
so scanty and vague in general, I don't dare consider it.  I am very 
curious about OpenAFS now; I took a look at the page:  do they have a 
server component for Windows which does not require its own partition?  
That was the rub, last time I checked, a number of years ago.
>> Do you have a simple way to have SMB NAS or XP Home shares mount 
>> automatically at login? 
>>
>>     
>
> Is what you are looking for wildly divergent from what autofs does?  Is
> it that you want users to be able to mount arbitrary windows shares
> based on their own config?
>
>
> Chris
>   
What I would like to do really, at user-level, is to run one single GUI 
app which can show a tree-hierarchy of every available share (optimally, 
SMB + NFS + AFS + any others we want to get interested in), and permit 
me to set any of them to automatically get mounted at login.  No extra 
'sudo' password entries, network passwords to be stored safely somehow.  
In other words, I'd like to do what the big DE file manager developers 
imagined, but for real, with real shares, not the fakery.

But given that the above is not available (given that I am not 
programmer enough to consider starting this as a project!), I don't have 
wants that make sense for end-users to self-configure at all :-(...but I 
would like to be able to set up something in their user-level 
autostartup, which mounts SMB shares.  Autofs and fstab don't cut it, 
because we're talking peer-to-peer, where the destination device may be 
turned off.  I don't want them to have to log out and in again to 
remount shares, I want them either to persist and auto-remount, or (as I 
have now, but with sudo-passwording) a script launcher on desktop for 
the remount.

J.E.B.