I'm trying to mount an SMB share on Solaris. (I know it can't be done, I just want to bitch a while.) This is so hard they're only just working on the feature in Solaris 10 (per the candid discussions from the OS developers on the OpenSolaris boards).

The suggested workaround is to export the share over NFS via Services for Unix on the NT box in question. This is what we're doing now, it combines the reliability of Windows with the user-friendliness of Unix — the NFS share just ... disappears from time to time and must be recreated by hand — and we're desperately after another way. Future scripts will use smbclient instead, which works very nicely, but we have lots of old scripts around and a systems programmer reluctant to embark on a major conversion exercise. (Same reason we can't just serve the share from a Unix box via Samba instead. Assume the SMB share can't be moved. We don't have any control over the box in question either.)

There's a proprietary commercial third-party solution called Sharity (which makes the SMB share available internally as if it's been mounted via NFS), which is the consensus real answer to the problem and which we're not going to use because it costs money. There's an ancient GPL version called Sharity Light, which does in fact compile and try to work on Solaris 8, but gives the following error, which Google is no help with any part of:

# ./shlight //debtors/ash/ /mnt -n
Kernel: smb_receive_raw: Invalid packet 0x83
Kernel: smb_receive: receive error: -5
Kernel: smb_proc_connect: Failed to send SESSION REQUEST.
error connecting to server: [5] I/O error
#

Error 5 is (I think) "no such share", but I know damn well the shares I've tested it on exist. Huh?

I'm this > < close to just finding a semi-discarded PC, installing Debian and mounting the share on that for export via NFS, which would actually be cheaper than Sharity. As well as utterly ridiculous.