Hello there. Please excuse me if this was discussed before. I could only find some mentions of the problem here and there, but not analysis or workarounds. There's a slight (or perhaps huge) problem with the CIFS in-kernel client and/or the mount.cifs command. In one sentence: long AD domain names do not work when authenticating against Windows servers. The detailed description is below. I have a bog-standard Windows Active Directory with one domain configured at my workplace. The domain name shall be "mydomain.example.com", and I'm "someuser". The following two commands do work: (1a) mount.cifs //server/share /dir -o user=someuser,dom=mydomain (1b) mount.cifs //server/share /dir -o user=mydomain\\someuser As far as I can tell they do exactly the same thing, so iin what follows I will refer only to the first variant. The following command does **not** work: (2) mount.cifs //server/share /dir \ -o user=someuser,dom=mydomain.example.com It results in the (in)famous "mount error(5): Input/output error" message. A command using the UPN notation does work: (3) mount.cifs //server/share /dir -o \ user=someuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Here's my attempt to analyze the situation. There's a field in the SMB protocol called PrimaryDomain, used in the SMB_COM_SESSION_SETUP_ANDX messages (both request and response). The CIFS client uses this field to transmit the "dom" parameter to the server. Here lies the problem, signs of which are as follows: 1) A Windows XP client which is not a member of mydomain leaves this field blank when supplied with a full someuser\mydomain.example.com username. 2) The file server uses the PrimaryDomain field of the response to sent the string "MYDOMAIN" (not mydomain.example.com) back to the client. 3) If I try to use "dom=" parameter to send any string longer than 15 characters, I get the "mount error (5): Input/output error" message. All these signs are hinting that Windows servers expect PrimaryDomain to be a NetBIOS domain name, not an AD domain name. The (3) command works because the CIFS client does not understand the UPN notation and and does not send anything in the PrimaryDoman field, thus avoiding the problem. The current official protocol specification doesn't mention any of this. It simply says PrimaryDomain (variable): A string representing the desired authentication domain. [... Unicode stuff snipped ] (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee442101%28v=PROT.13%29.aspx) Samba implements the latest official protocol to the letter. It accepts the full long AD domain name in the PrimaryDomain field, and does not understand the UPN notation. This means that (2) works with Samba servers and (3) does not, just the opposite of Windows servers. Best regards -- Anatoli Tubman MAB Group anatolit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx +972.3.611.5203 Check Point Software Technologies www.checkpoint.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-cifs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html