Bristol Digest, Vol 575, Issue 5

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Today's Topics:

1. DNS issue with old Samba (Mike Yates)


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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2014 10:56:28 +0000
From: Mike Yates <bblug@fonehelp.co.uk>
To: Bristol and Bath Linux User Group <bristol@mailman.lug.org.uk>
Subject: [bristol] DNS issue with old Samba
Message-ID:
<CAKU1sbxKeRJmmk=DLHN3+-3q=pG=Jf6t=zCAUEbfaQBBiU559Q@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

When I saw the long thread on DNS issues, I thought at first it might be
related to an issue I've had with my NAS (WD MyBook World 2) since last
March. It was caused by the upgrade of my netbook from Win8 to Win8.1,
which uses Microsoft SMB v4 (supported by samba v3.6.2) for the first time.
Any attempt by the netbook to use the Samba v3.0.34 on the NAS caused a
crash of the DNS service on the NAS and it became unreachable (bricked)
until rudely rebooted by its power plug. Unfortunately, once a Windows
device has "seen" an smb/cifs server, it remembers (in some obfuscated way)
to check it out (crashing old samba) on every boot-up. Many users have
reported this with little knowledge of the root cause. There are some
registry fixes published but they didn't work for me. However, I found, by
diagnostic cron jobs, that the NAS was still running in every way except
DNS, still able to ping a numeric IPs. I devised a cron job which tested
connectivity by a named ping every five minutes and, if that failed,
restarted the eth0 interface (restarting nmbd didn't suffice). Then I could
use the NAS with nfs (from my Ubuntu netbook but no way on Win8.1 unless
enterpise version) or ftp and, from Android, smb.

On 25 July 2014 13:04, WD Support <wdsupport@wdc.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately WDH1NC10000E is legacy product and is not supported under
Windows 8.
> Also no further updates will be released.

I had tried telling them that there was a serious security (root-kit)
vulnerability in all versions of samba up to 3.6.4 and suggesting that they
should at least issue a "last online update" putting a warning on the
device's admin webpage, but to no avail!

Last month found that optware, designed for the nls2 "slug" device, is
compatible with my NAS and can online-install samba v3.2.15 from their
"unstable" repository. Hey presto, Win8.1 doesn't crash that, despite
samba.org asserting that smb v4 issues were not fixed until v3.6.2. So, my
NAS is probably still vulnerable to root-kits (if they'd work in such a
simple Busybox environment?) but at least it can be "explored" from Win8.1
and doesn't disappear for five minutes whenever a Win8.1 device accesses
the LAN.

So, beware outdated embedded devices!
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End of Bristol Digest, Vol 575, Issue 5
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