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Re: cron and network drives


Corinna Vinschen wrote:

On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 02:25:03PM -0700, Andrew DeFaria wrote:

My understanding of accessing mount points (shares that have been mounted to a drive letter) is that if you telnet or login (or switchuser) in such a way as to have a passwordless login then mount points are marked as unavailable. Further I understand that cron runs as SYSTEM and switches user to the owner of the crontab. Thus a passwordless login has occurred therefore mount points are unavailable. Yet on hosta it works but on hostb it fails.

I don't pretend to understand how the SMB code in Windows works. It seems to be different on different machines. On my machine `net use' doesn't even bother to print any of the active shares when in a passwordless session:


$ net use
New connections will not be remembered.

There are no entries in the list.

Corinna, you are responsible for the cron code right? I think you also did a lot of the security stuff with inetutils, etc. Does cron do what I thought, which is run as SYSTEM and switchuser in a passwordless manner to the user of the crontab?


If so and it is also true that passwordless logins will not have access to mapped drives then we still have a mystery here as to why it works on one machine and not on the other.

One thought that I had is perhaps it has something to do Windows startup scripts or login scripts. I've never really understood them well but perhaps at one site the login script does an explicit net use t: \\server\share whereas the other site doesn't. If such login scripts are executed before the user physically logs into the system (IOW in the same manner as services) then it would follow that the cron service would also have visibility to the drive (the T drive in this case). I'll have to ask our Windows guy...

But I can access shares from within a passwordless session if I create the sharing inside of the session using `net use'. Well, sometimes. And it's a bit tricky, since it only works when not using drive letters (so I have to use the //server/share path for accessing the share) and only if I specify the full user name including domain or password server
respectively:


$ net use \\\\server\\share password /user:SERVER_OR_DOMAIN\\corinna

Well I was trying to spare you all the details of why I need access to a drive letter but it involves a cron job that performs a Clearcase command that invokes a bastardized version of Perl derived from ActiveState Perl which requires Windows compliant pathnames to Perl modules. Since this trigger of Perl can happen anywhere in the domain I have been using a drive letter. Perhaps I can use a UNC path instead. I guess I'll have to try it.




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