Set UID no longer supported on mount.cifs

[jbk]

As the subject line says you can no longer make mount.cifs setuid. The 
change was made last November but the effects did not appear in the 
distributions till January.

I have used the setuid feature to let users mount their network shares 
locally on login and then un-mount and delete the mount points on 
logout, all via scripts that are run by the WM so that it is transparent 
to them.

I have not been effected by the change due to the fact that I made 
copies of the binaries mount.cifs and umount.cifs and stuck them under 
/usr/local/bin where they are not updated. I don't know how long this 
will work. So the only solution I can think of is to make all the users 
sudo users with NOPASSWD enabled. I can also stipulate the binaries they 
can execute.

Samba's reason for the change is that it is possible to escalate your 
privileges (mount shares that are not permitted) because cifs can't 
verify the credentials of the user. The discussion on the developer list 
noted that there was no report of this ever occurring only that it 
could, and since they did not feel it was a priority to fix it, they 
just disabled the setuid ability.

Does anyone see another means to maintain the users ability to mount 
their network shares transparently?

Jim KR