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I am in the process of rebuilding my server using the new Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, and the first problem I just encountered is that it can no longer mount my old Network Attached Storage drive which is advertised as a Samba share.  The usual command is:

smbmount //nas/share /mnt/share -o username=guest,password=

This works on all my other Unix boxes, so I was a bit surprised to see this failure in a latest version of Ubuntu. The cryptic error is:

mount error 5 = Input/output error

and dmesg output shows even more cryptic messages:

[ 7738.616246]  CIFS VFS: Malformed FILE_UNIX_BASIC_INFO response.
[ 7738.616291]  CIFS VFS: cifs_read_super: get root inode failed

It turns out that the new world has switched to using something called CIFS, which seems to be backward compatible with SMBFS (as used by Samba). However, it seems some of the new protocols are not backward compatible with the old Samba 2.0 protocols (which is what my old NAS box uses). From what I can interpret of the error message, it seems like Ubuntu tries to set Unix file system attributes on the newly mounted Samba share, which of course fails miserably. The solution, as it turns out, is simply to turn off this feature. I had to Google for this, but hopefully it saves you the time and bother. The command is:

smbmount //nas/share /mnt/share -o username=guest,password=,nounix


Et voilà!

The only downside is obviously all your files are mounted world read-writable, but I guess it is no worse than being on a Windows box...

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