CIFS failed to allocate memory?

If you are mounting your Windows network shares in your Ubuntu, do not hurry to move your files to this newly added mount point. Most probably you will be regret very soon, as the system may give you error Failed to allocate memory and soon after that your files will gone missing. Yes, all gone! That's what happened to me.

The issues seems to cause by Windows rather than Ubuntu itself. There is a good explanation in this link:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Samba/Troubleshooting

But I will copy & paste some of the content here, in case the link broken in the future.

======== Copy & Paste from archlinux.org, please contact me if remove is required ========

Windows 7 connectivity problems - mount error(12): cannot allocate memory

A known Windows 7 bug that causes "mount error(12): cannot allocate memory" on an otherwise perfect cifs share on the Linux end can be fixed by setting a few registry keys on the Windows box as follows:

• HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache (set to 1)
• HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size (set to 3)

Alternatively, start Command Prompt in Admin Mode and execute the following:

reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management" /v "LargeSystemCache" /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters" /v "Size" /t REG_DWORD /d 3 /f

Do one of the following for the settings to take effect:

• Restart Windows
• Restart the Server service via services.msc
• From the Command Prompt run: 'net stop lanmanserver' and 'net start lanmanserver' - The server may automatically restart after stopping it.

Note: Googling will reveal another tweak recommending users to add a key modifying the "IRPStackSize" size. This is incorrect for fixing this issue under Windows 7. Do not attempt it.

[Linux] file_mode, dir_mode or permission not working correctly in Samba Share or Mount folder

Users permission in Linux is really complicated, for samba share, you need to take care:

1. the folder permission of the parents folder where your samba share is located (at server side)
2. the folder permission of the parents folder where your fstab mounted folder is located
3. the create mask and directory mask in /etc/samba/smb.conf on your server
4. the file_mode, directory_mode, noperm, rw and credentials in your /etc/fstab on client PC

General rules are parent folders permission will always overwrite the smb.conf & fstab. 

When do I need to check the parents folder permission?

1. If you have set everything in both files and still cannot get the correct permission for new created file/directory in your samba shares. Check client PCs mount folder's parent's permission
2. If client PCs has problem access the samba shares, even with the correct username & password entered. Check server samba share parent's folder permission
3. When you need valid users = xxx, xxx to give access to client PCs. Check server samba share parent's folder permission

I have set the samba/fstab/parent folder permission, but I still don't have write permission?

1. you need to add uid=***your current user name*** at the fstab mount option.

Known Issue

1. When creating file/directory in the mount folder (using Ubuntu 12.10), it does not honor the create mask & directory mask set by the server's smb.conf. I'm still looking for a solution... appreciate if anyone can help.

[Ubuntu] Can access samba network share by IP but not Netbios name from Windows

After whole long day of troubleshooting why we cannot resolve samba shared folders using the NetBIOS Name defined in smb.conf.. finally I have figured out the root of the problem:

Hostname CANNOT equal to NetBIOS name!!!

A bit of background...

1. our server hostname is server1
2. our NetBIOS name is server1 (defined in smb.conf)
3. IP-address is 10.0.0.2

From Windows 7 / OSX we can access the samba shares using \\10.0.0.2\share, as well as \\server1.local\share (the .local is a result of running avahi-daemon). We can also ping 10.0.0.2 or server1 or server1.local, but we simply cannot access with \\server1\share

By changing the Hostname in /etc/hosts & /etc/hostname to any name other than "server1", or change the NetBIOS name in smb.conf to any other name, we can now get it work.

This is rather weird for a Windows user like me, where only hostname need to be set and we can access directly from other PC in the network without bothering what is NetBIOS. Linux is indeed too tricky!

Anyway, kind of fun when able to figure out what's wrong. It makes me love and hate Linux at the same moment!

Damn you, buggy Samba 3.6.3

I have been finding solution to address a samba sharing (Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS) for few days, the errors that I faced:

1. windows 7 cannot access share
2. windows 7 keep asking password to access samba share
3. windows 7 computer on other VLAN cannot browse the Ubuntu server with Windows Explorer
4. troubleshoot using smbclient -L localhost -U% give errors such as:
   - tree connect failed, NT_STATUS_CONNECTION_INVALID

And very very luckily... I found a discussion & an article which discussed about the bug found in Samba 3.6.3, and suggest to upgrade to 3.6.7:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/55534/samba-server-3-6-3-crashes-on-simple-setup-on-linux-mint-13

https://www.monlore.nl/blog/?p=226 (Marcel's blog)

Thanks god their suggestion work.. and damn Ubuntu & Samba, how could they release such a buggy version for LTS and do not issue immediate upgrade in the official repository?!!

Alright, here's the solution copy from Marcel's blog:

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nathan-renniewaldock/ppa
• apt-get update
• apt-get install samba

Voila! Now Samba works like a charm!

[Ubuntu] The bad day!! How to recover from dmraid

Today is a real bad day, one of the Ubuntu server that I "managed" (it's not me who installed it) has gone down! There could be two reasons:

1. Incompatible version of Zentyal (Zentyal 3.0 was accidentally installed on this 12.10, causing the samba not functioning)
2. The electrical leak in the office due to DP box does not have proper earth line installed. Damn it, the whole rack is covered by electricity, and I got an electric shock! Luckily it was not at high current else all devices and I would have died =_=!

Well.. after hours of troubleshooting, I could not bring the server up and running again. It halted at different stage of loading, sometimes failed to load Samba, sometimes failed at Checking Quota...

I do suspect it is caused by the Zentyal... but time is running out. I rush back to home, taking my laptop SSD* installed with Ubuntu 12.10, together with as many as HDD I could found available for the backup**, and plugged into the server.

Voila! Now I'm inside my laptop Ubuntu, and by running dmraid -r, I could now see the RAID under name isw_xxxxx (isw is a prefix for Intel RST). By running dmraid -ay (activate with silent mode YES), I can now see the whole RAID in Nautilus.

I'm backing up those file now... hopefully the files and directories in the server are still in good condition. Losing a single files will be disaster. Cross finger!

=======================

* Why SSD? Because the Ubuntu server was installed using dmraid and Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technology), so SSD can work well as most of the time SSD is used under AHCI. SATA drive that previously installed without AHCI would fail to boot up.

** Please make sure you use a reliable HDD for the backup. You won't like to fail the second time where you could be only having once chance to perform the recovery.

*** Regarding the mdadm and dmraid, here are some good reads:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto
• http://raid6.com.au/posts/mdadm_advantages/
• http://www.sourceware.org/lvm2/wiki/DMRAID

[Ubuntu] Temporarily / Permanently Mount Cifs Network Shares

It is strange that Ubuntu 12.10 doesn't come with cifs-utils installed. Whenever you try to mount a network folder via mount -t cifs -o username=user,password=pass //server-name/shared /mnt/shared, it will give you the following error message:

1:  mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //192.168.0.11/Dropbox,  
2:      missing codepage or helper program, or other error  
3:      (for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might  
4:      need a /sbin/mount.<type> helper program)  
5:      In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try  
6:      dmesg | tail or so  

Execute dmesg | tail will return the following result:

1:  [ 5537.959706] CIFS VFS: Connecting to DFS root not implemented yet  
2:  [ 5537.959815] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22  

To solve this, simply apt-get install cifs-utils. After that run the same command again and you should be able to mount the network shared folder.

To permanently mount the shared folders, go to /etc/fstab, and add the following line:

1:  //server-name/shared     /mnt/shared     cifs     defaults,_netdev,credentials=/home/user/.smbcredentials     0     0  

_netdev parameter is being explained at the last section of this documentation, which in general mean connect only when network is available:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MountWindowsSharesPermanently

credentials and /home/user/.smbcredentials is a file created to store the username and password for the remote login, so that we don't put these sensitive info at risk because the /etc/fstab can be viewed by every users on the system. DO NOT forget to set the file permission for the .smbcredentials:

1:  chmod 600 /home/user/.smbcredentials  

Now enjoy working with your network shares!

If you would like to read on, the following articles is good to go:

1. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Samba/SambaClientGuide
2. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently
3. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MountWindowsSharesPermanently

How to deal with space in file path?

In modern computing, we are not restricted to use file/folder name with space between each words. This tends to create trouble if we want to mount the path in /etc/fstab

The solution to this is to add "\040" where the space is. For example:

//192.168.0.2/Shared Folder

has to be written as

//192.168.0.2/Shared\040Folder

[Fedora] Samba File Sharing Revisit

Update 25/12/12 17:40
Alright, I have much better idea what happen now. The pcmanfm file explorer that come with LXDE does not auto mount network folder, but Dolphin will do the trick.

As for the cifs-utils, that is needed to mount network folder from within the terminal.

So what about samba stuffs? I haven't dig into that, but if you have problem, no harm to install that.

I hope this update will make things clearer.

=======================================

Network file sharing is not easy in Linux. Despite my Xfce works fine with Samba network, but I have no luck on newly installed LXDE.

So what's the problem with it? To be very honest, I did not analyse the problem, initially I work around with mount & umount discussed in previous post. But today I have installed a few stuff from the package manager and it seems to work now directly from within Dolphin.

Below are packages that you may try to install to get it works:

1. cifs-utils
2. autofs (I guess this one is to deal with USB stick, cd/dvd, rather than network. But if you haven't install, you may try this.)
3. samba-common
4. samba Server and Client software to interoperate with Windows machine

Somehow, I feel it is the cifs-utils which do the trick. I would not dig to the root of this issue, perhaps next time. Until then, I hope this will help.

And one last thing, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2013!!