topic Re: fas2020: CIFS share, Linux mount.cifs, chown, "permission denied"? in Network and Storage Protocols

fas2020: CIFS share, Linux mount.cifs, chown, "permission denied"?

karstenrink — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:47:10 GMT

Folks;

not sure whether this is a question that really belongs here and/or a question related to NetApp or rather the Linux mount.cifs utility: Does someone around here have any experience mounting CIFS shares provided by a NetApp Filer (FAS 2020 in our case) on Linux hosts? For what I see, most of the file system functionality works pretty well, except for one thing: Trying to do chmod or chown on any files on the mounted CIFS share reliably ends up in a "permission denied" as soon as the user trying to do so is anyone else but root.

Played around with various combinations of mounting as root and/or explicitely assigning (uid=, gid=) the share content to belong to some dedicated user, this didn't really change much. Reading the manual page of mount.cifs, I learnt that, due to CIFS nature, chmod and chown will always succeed yet not do anything meaningful - which obviously is not the case on our system. Am I missing something in that? Or is this just the way things should be?

TIA for any input on that!

Cheers,

Kristian

Re: fas2020: CIFS share, Linux mount.cifs, chown, "permission denied"?

aborzenkov — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:11:11 GMT

Chown is generally restricted to root only for security reasons. It happens even before kernel knows about type of file system involved.

For chmod I am not sure. Usually I do not use CIFS between two systems that both can use NFS ☺

Re: fas2020: CIFS share, Linux mount.cifs, chown, "permission denied"?

karstenrink — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:15:06 GMT

You're right about chown, I should have been more careful, thanks. Yet in our case, as most of the desktop systems use win32 and most of the servers use CIFS, so far we have had a pretty pleasant time using CIFS mount on Linux machines. However, as part of our (proprietary) backend system does get off track due to the "permission denied" returned by chmod, I wanted to get rid of this somehow.

Anyway, thanks for your time and response, much appreciated.