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       susmb.md (3958B)
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            1 usmb is a program to mount SMB shares from userland via FUSE.
            2 Under-the-hood it uses Samba and exposes the network share as a regular local filesystem.
            3 Programs can just access the filesystem and for example do not need to add code for SMB support or link against Samba.
            4 It is more convenient than scripting around smbclient in some cases.  
            5 smbclient(1): <https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/smbclient.1.html>
            6 
            7 susmb is a fork of usmb from 2013-02-04.
            8 <http://repo.or.cz/w/usmb.git/snapshot/aa94e132c12faf1a00f547ea4a96b5728612dea6.tar.gz>
            9 (git commit aa94e132c12faf1a00f547ea4a96b5728612dea6)
           10 
           11 usmb has been unmaintained since 2013. Sometimes programs are finished and so
           12 being unmaintained is not so bad. I think the general idea of the code was good
           13 and it is still a useful program for some systems, probably mostly BSD systems.
           14 Linux has a SMB/CIFS driver anyway.
           15 
           16 The two main reasons I forked usmb were performance issues with it on OpenBSD
           17 (because of hardcoded options and assumptions for FUSE for Linux) and issues by
           18 using it in non-interactive mode.
           19 
           20 
           21 ## Clone
           22 
           23         git clone git://git.codemadness.org/susmb
           24 
           25 
           26 ## Browse
           27 
           28 You can browse the source-code at:
           29 
           30 * <https://git.codemadness.org/susmb/>
           31 * <gopher://codemadness.org/1/git/susmb>
           32 
           33 
           34 ## Download releases
           35 
           36 Releases are available at:
           37 
           38 * <https://codemadness.org/releases/susmb/>
           39 * <gopher://codemadness.org/1/releases/susmb>
           40 
           41 
           42 ## Build and install
           43 
           44         $ make
           45         # make install
           46 
           47 
           48 ## Dependencies
           49 
           50 * C compiler.
           51 * libc + BSD extensions (libbsd on Linux).
           52 * FUSE 2.6 or later (and probably version <3).
           53 * Samba / libsmbclient 4.20+.
           54 
           55 
           56 ## Usage example
           57 
           58         susmb \
           59                 -u hiltjo \
           60                 -f \
           61                 -o 'uid=1000,gid=1000,allow_other' \
           62                 "smb://domain\someuser@192.168.1.1/Storage" \
           63                 /mnt/share
           64 
           65 
           66 ## Changes
           67 
           68 susmb has the patches applied from OpenBSD ports 7.6:
           69 <https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ports/sysutils/usmb/patches>
           70 
           71 Below is a summary of the most important changes:
           72 
           73 
           74 ## Performance
           75 
           76 * Set struct stat st.st_blksiz to a higher number for more efficient buffering
           77   for programs using the standard FILE* stdio interfaces. Huge improvement for
           78   reads and writes.  
           79   On OpenBSD the default block size for FUSE is 512 bytes.
           80   This crippled network performance.  
           81   On OpenBSD there is no FUSE caching layer (at time of writing 2025-09-07), so
           82   each read call had more overhead.
           83 * Remove the hardcoded FUSE mount option max_read=N.  
           84   This crippled network performance.
           85 
           86 
           87 ## Security
           88 
           89 * Many code simplifications and deletions (reducing attack surface and makes it
           90   easier to review).
           91 * Use unveil(2) syscall to lock down much of the filesystem except the
           92   mountpoint and required FUSE devices.
           93 * Optional privilege dropping support: on OpenBSD FUSE would need to run as root:
           94   (sysctl kern.usermount was removed around July 2016, around
           95   commit 65c8a8a0394483b41de8f02c862e65fb529cf538).  
           96   After mounting the filesystem and acquiring access to the FUSE driver
           97   privileges are dropped. This is not perfect, but at least now the Samba smbclient
           98   code runs as a user again.
           99 * Reading the password from the terminal in a secure way using readpassphrase(3).
          100 
          101 
          102 ## Cleanups
          103 
          104 * Merge everything into one C file for easier code review.
          105 * Remove Samba < 3.3 compatibility layer and code. This is hard to test
          106   nowadays anyway.
          107 * Use getopt for option parsing: remove dependencies on glib which was used for
          108   option parsing only.
          109 * Remove long option support.
          110 * Remove libxml2 dependency and configuration via XML. Configuration is now
          111   done via a simpler syntax as a URI from the command-line. This was also
          112   listed in the man page under the BUGS section as a wanted feature.
          113 * Remove autoconf and Debian-specific packaging files. Use a simple Makefile.
          114 * Man page rewritten from roff to mandoc.
          115 
          116 
          117 ## OpenBSD port added as sysutils/susmb
          118 
          119 An OpenBSD port was added to sysutils/susmb (thanks to Pascal Stumpf!).
          120 
          121 Mailinglist thread: <https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=177169411929407&w=2>