[CentOS] Mounting SMB shares for samba home dirs

[Nick Bryant]

Hi,

I currently use Samba server as a PDC on a centos 3.5 box for a bunch of XP
clients which works perfectly.</centos plug>

I want to mount a share on a NAS box we have kicking about and use that
share to put all the users home dirs in. Sadly my NAS box is a Windows 2003
server appliance (although, to be fair - it does the job).

So I create a share on the NAS box, create a user on the Samba server who I
then assign write permissions on the newly created share (yes, the NAS is a
domain member) and then put the NAS share's details into the Samba server's
/etc/fstab like so:

\\nasboxen\newshare /mnt/userhomes smbfs  auto,credentials=/etc/samba/afile
0 0

mount -a /mnt/syd01-test/ 

and it mounts perfectly:

[root at lemon mnt]# mount
[snip]
//nasboxen/newshare on /mnt/userhomes type smbfs (0)

Now the problem comes when I want to put a userdir in there because when I
try and set the ownership:

[root at lemon mnt]# chown nick testing
chown: changing ownership of `testing': Operation not permitted

I presume this is because it's a smb filesystem and it doesn't support unix
ownership flags. So the question is... can it be done?

Cheers,

Nick