Tag Archives: user

Samba denied on FreeNAS

Posted on by
Reply

If you recently discovered that some of your authenticated samba shares on your FreeNAS refuse to well authenticate. And maybe you did your own investigation and found that it failed with NT_STATUS_NO_SUCH_USER. Do not worry, you are not alone!

From what I understand, the last update changed the constraints on the user accounts metadata. In particular it seems that the E-Mail field must now point to a real e-mail address (something@domain) and cannot just be an alias to another local user.

Don’t know if that’s intended or not or why it would be. Going to IRC right now to find out.

Long story short, users that don’t match the new constraints are not recognized anymore by samba (and probably other services too), hence the permission denied and NT_STATUS_NO_SUCH_USER. So for those user using a local alias as E-Mail, use a fully qualified E-Mail. That will fix the shares. However it seems that "user"@localhost doesn’t work either. And you will also have to retype their password.

Custom user Xsession with SDDM

Posted on by
1

Debian stretch is out, a lot of obsolete packages, a lot of major upgrades, which all in all resulted in quite a painful transition the last few days. But I’ll tell you more about that in the following posts.

I don’t really spend much time on Linux nowadays so KDE (along with KDM) has always been my goto solution for a jack all trade no-BS works-out-of-the-box desktop environment. And it worked like that just fine, until… well you know how software goes. KDE has been upgraded, KDM has been depreciated and replaced with SDDM.

I also use xsession so that I have a common way of starting session scripts and daemons (such as this one) and configuring stuff across different desktops. I generally selected custom session in the display manager and that was it. But SDDM does not seem to provide a way to do so, or at least that’s not so clear.

By default, it will execute /etc/sddm/xsession which itself sources /etc/X11/Xsession to which it will pass as argument the value of the Exec line in the desktop file (located in /usr/share/xsessions) describing the currently selected session.

If we want to bypass this, we need to scrap the argument passed to /etc/X11/Xsession no matter what SDDM thinks the current session should be. To do so create a wrapper for Xsession in /etc/X11/user-Xsession:

#!/bin/sh

export PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin

# Discard argument, we don't care about selecting the desktop environment.
/etc/X11/Xsession

And now configure SDDM to use this instead of its own version of it, in /etc/sddm.conf:

[X11]
SessionCommand=/etc/X11/user-Xsession

Nginx home directories and PHP

Posted on by
4

I use nginx as my main HTTP server.  I want the users to be able to publish their own pages in a special directory (public_html) within their home directory. They should also be able to use PHP scripts if they want to. You can access the user webpage (that is the content of their public_html directory) with this URL: http://[server]/~[user]/. Here is a snippet of the configuration I use to do so:

index index.html index.xml index.php;

# PHP in home directory
location ~ ^/~(.+?)(/.*\.php)(.*)$ {
  alias /home/$1/public_html;

  try_files $2 =404;
  fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
  fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
  fastcgi_index index.php;
  fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
  include fastcgi_params;

  fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /~$1$fastcgi_script_name;
}

# Home directories
location ~ ^/~(.+?)(/.*)?$ {
  alias /home/$1/public_html$2;
}

You can see here the two locations that match the user directories. The first one matches the PHP scripts and passes them to the FastCGI process manager. For more information, see PHPFcgiExample. Note that I use a UNIX instead of an INET socket. Why would you bother IP on localhost when you can use an UNIX socket? I also set the SCRIPT_NAME parameter to ensure that it is derived correctly from the user URL. This need to be fixed for pages that point to themselves. I also had to restart php5-fpm to ensure that the changes were taken into account.