Problem with gvfs-mount and smb shares without password

[Baer]

I am running Jessie 8.4 with all updates installed. Network shares are established among several Windows 7, 8, 10 workstations and 2 Jessie servers. These Jessie servers run LXDE. LXDE's PCManFM can sucessfully connect to smb shares (regardless if these shares are Windows workstation or Linux server shares). The Jessie servers supply working smb shares to the workstations. So in general my whole networking setup seems to be fine (has worked for years).

There is only one new problem: I have several network shares which are not password protected. Access to these shares is not made using the guest userid, but using regular user accounts, just without password. In the past this was no problem. But some update lately screwed it up.

When I try to connect to a smb share which does not have a password, PCManFM brings up the little dialog as usual, with userid and domain/workgroup already filled out and asking for a password. I leave the password field blank, hit 'OK' and ... the dialog pops up again.
I think PCManFM uses gvfs-mount to mount the shares. So I tried gvfs-mount in a xterm window ... same problem. gvfs-mount keeps asking for the password over and over again. I then tried:

Code: Select all

sudo mount -t cifs //computer_name/share_name /mnt -o username=my_account,password=""

This worked without a problem although it is not very useful, because only root will have access to that share. But it does work to access smb shares which have no password (well, it always has worked until lately).

So the big question is: what in the world do I have to do to make gvfs-mount accept an empty password? Any help is very much appreciated.

Markus.

[ralph.ronnquist]

My googling of "pcmanfm without password" pointed me at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCManFM, which then points at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Polkit as useful reading regarding "mounting without password". Scanning for the word "without" in that one brings up the suggestion of creating a file in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d with one or more "rules" to a accept authentication in certain circumstances without asking for password.

Perhaps it's the proper way though certainly not straight-forward.

Note that you'll need to debianize whatever they say. Probably easy.