topic Re: Frustrating CIFS config issue... Help? in Alfresco Archive

Frustrating CIFS config issue... Help?

meansartin14 — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:14:28 GMT

Alfresco Platform:- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5.2- Alfresco Enterprise 3.0.0- MySQL 5.0.45 (came with RHEL5.2)- Java JDK 1.6 Update 7- Tomcat 6.0.18 (came with Alfresco installation)- OpenOffice.org 3Issue:None of the configured Alfresco users are able to map a network drive to the Alfresco CI

Re: Frustrating CIFS config issue... Help?

joglekar — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:57:39 GMT

Check if linux samba and nmbd services are running.

stop smb and nmbd services of linux.

If nmbd is running you cannot access the CIFS by server name but will be accessible with only IP.
stop and start Alfresco and check if you get the login for CIFS.

It worked for me.

Re: Frustrating CIFS config issue... Help?

meansartin14 — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:03:26 GMT

Check if linux samba and nmbd services are running.

stop smb and nmbd services of linux.

If nmbd is running you cannot access the CIFS by server name but will be accessible with only IP.
stop and start Alfresco and check if you get the login for CIFS.

It worked for me.

I do NOT have an smb or nmbd service configured on my RHEL5 server. Neither of these services appeared when I viewed the system-config-services GUI and neither of them appear in the process table.

I have rebooted the server, as well as rebooted the Alfresco application numerous times independently. I have deleted all Alfresco users and recreated them, to no avail.

I am still unable to use the Map Network Drive… Windows to show the Alfresco CIFS server as a shared drive.

PLEASE NOTE: Alfresco's CIFS was working as recently as 2 weeks ago. I have exhaustively compared (using diff and a script) Alfresco's configuration files to a 'fresh install' backup I made; there are no differences that would effect the CIFS server.

Re: Frustrating CIFS config issue... Help?

meansartin14 — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:35:51 GMT

I have started a thread that I hope to eventually turn into a AlfrescoWiki page for how to configure Active Directory authentication for both CIFS and the Web Interface in Alfresco Labs 3c.

Please see my thread:
[ERROR]Alfresco Engineers: CIFS auth does not work. Sugg?

Please come join in the discussion, or at least subscribe to the thread. I want to try to get everyone having these types of issues into the thread so that we can get a large collection of experiences and configurations.

We WILL find the answer for how to enable Active Directory authentication with CIFS in Alfresco!!

Re: Frustrating CIFS config issue... Help?

rrb_2 — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:38:39 GMT

when providing the CIFS path I have found that it is important that the path used is to the share home folder level of the user logging in.

Example: Alfresco UserId "Alfred" has an alfresco home space on /User Homes/Alfred.

When mapping the USERS shared drive you need to provide:
\\yourserverA.what.ever.org\alfresco\User Homes\Alfred
then "use different user" in the drive mapping dialog …
User: Alfred
password: xxxxxx ( as set for alfred in alfresco)

It is VERY easy to get confused on this when first testing using the admin account that has privs everywhere,
but when you go into "okay now lets give it to a few friendly users" mode you cannot make it work for them and you get that jlan invalid device type message ( if you look in the log), and end up looking foolish to those you are trying to get going on the product.

When I get this wrong, to me, it is characterised by very long hangs to connect, (a minute or more) then eventual connection. This is followed by a dropped connection when you try to navigate ("explore") into a child folder in the windows explorer. This "half failed" result is problematic because it makes no sense at all.
The other clue on this is when you start hunting about for other user id's to authenticate with (PCNAME\Alfred
substitution for "Alfred" by windows when the connection fails leads one down this path very easily.)

( Opinion: This is simply a user hostile message when you consider the usage context in which it occurs: the device type is not invalid, the path is. The device "instance" might be invalid, but the type"? no way. Simply choosing to use the word "device" anywhere in this message provokes confusion. However it is not nearly as user hostile as the whole mess that is Microsoft's Drive mapping CIFS/SMB wizard versus WEBDAV wizards dichotomy around authentication. MS Active Directory only adds to the opportunities for grief and further misconceptions).

hth,
r

Re: Frustrating CIFS config issue... Help?

erictice — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:02:07 GMT

Do you have a sample file-servers-config.xml for this solution?