Re: Possible regression: unable to mount CIFS 1.0 shares from older machines since 76a3c92ec9e0668e4cd0e9ff1782eb68f61a179c

[Clemens Leu]

Hi all

Here follows now another practical reason why it is at the moment a 
quite unhappy decision to ditch the NTLM/CIFS 1.0 support entirely.

I am on Kubuntu 20.04 LTS and the access to my Apple Time Capsule worked 
fine. This changed when kernel 5.15.0-41-generic was installed some time 
ago. Since then I have in dmesg the known "kernel: bad security option: 
ntlm" and "kernel: CIFS: VFS: bad security option: ntlm" messages and no 
access is possible any longer to the Time Capsule.

So it looks that commit "[76a3c92ec9e0668e4cd0e9ff1782eb68f61a179c] 
cifs: remove support for NTLM and weaker authentication algorithms" has 
completely broken my Time Capsule access.

Yes, I know, ntlm is more than 20 years old and a quite insecure 
protocol. It is absolutely understandable to disable it as default. 
However, it should be also regarded that there exist companies which 
decided because of narrow-minded reasons to implement only the old SMB1 
protocol also on not so old hardware. Apple is such an example, they 
really implemented on all of their Time Capsule models (which were using 
a special Samba implementation) only the stone-age variant of SMB/NTLM. 
This is true even for the last 2013 variant which was discontinued on 
April 26, 2018. Apple could for sure support a more recent SMB version 
but they didn't do it most likely to make their own AFP3 protocol look 
and perform better.

So the alternative would be AFP in my case, unfortunately it's not so 
easy. While we have thanks to Netatalk a rock-solid AFP support in Linux 
at the server side, this is unfortunately not true for the client one. 
The corresponding "afpfs-ng" (Apple Filing Protocol Library, a client 
implementation of the Apple Filing Protocol) project is unmaintained and 
dormant for years.

Long story short, the current situation in this topic is as I said quite 
unhappy. While I fully agree to disable NTLM/CIFS 1.0 as default, it 
shouldn't be removed entirely. Maybe it is possible to enable it only 
for accessing older network volumes/shares while on the same time block 
the possibility to create insecure NTLM network shares? I am aware that 
the risk in enabling this old and flawed protocol will be my own 
problem. I won't complain if I get into trouble because of it. ;-) 
Unfortunately I have no alternative other than buying a new NAS or 
downgrading to an older kernel which is also not a really practical option.

Whatever, many thanks for all your great work!