How to mount SMB users with hidden shares

ℹ️ Support
1

On our Window Domain Controller user shares are created with $ to make them hidden shares eg \dc\user$ - is there any way to specify that in the external storage app ? I tried the following for the Share field and none worked:

$user$ $user$ $user\$ $user’$’ $user"$" $user%24

In general is there a way to pass non-standard characters to input fields.

I verified that the system running Nextcloud (13.0.5.2) stable, on CentOS 7, php 7.1 can access the DC with the smbclient command as:

smbclient -U test \dc\test$

Thanks.

2

I’m in the almost the same boat.

All of our students are on \server\share$\grad_year\username

I need to be able to pass in variables from LDAP to the external storage

3

Same here. As bluesky.ca mentioned before, I am not able to mount hidden Windows smb shares with the $user variable. I also tried to escape the $ character in different ways. Also no success. The app ‘SMB connection test’ can mount the hidden share fine, but the external storage connector can’t. Neither with the $user variable nor the with the entered username and the $ appended. I really need this feature for a usecase in multiple schools to mount the home directories of the students.

Used nextcloud version: 15.0.2

Edit: I’ve updated to nextcloud version 15.0.5 with no results. We really need this feature ASAP

4

Finally
I’ve found the problem.
It seems that nextcloud tries to establish the smb connection directly with php.
With an modification in /var/www/nextcloud/apps/files_external/lib/config.php you can append the “$” for the hidden user shares to the user variable.
Just add $user .= “$”; under line 203, so that it’s set before the if-statement.
But that’s just a workaround and works only with Windows Server 2008R2 and below

Solution
The final solution is to install the package php-libsmbclient, so nextcloud uses the smbclient on your nextcloud server to connect to the Windows Server with the hidden shares.
After that you can add the external storage in nextcloud.

Folder name: Choose free, it’s just the name inside of nextcloud
External Storage: SMB / CIFS
Authentication: Log-in credentials, save in database (diffrence to session is, that you can share your storage files and folders with other users)
Host: Your DC (I used the IP address)
Share: $user$

Additionaly I defined
client min protocol = SMB2
client max protocol = SMB3
in the global section of
/etc/samba/smb.conf

Hope this helps you out

1 Like
5

mark: afaik linuxsystems will see every windows-“hidden” user-share, though.
it’s just windows interpreting a closing “$” as “don’t show/hidden”

6

I know. When you use smbclient in bash everything works fine, just nextcloud needs php-libsmbclient as wrapper.

7

Hi,
In my case I don’t have this file: /var/www/nextcloud/public_html/apps/files_external/config.php
I find /var/www/nextcloud/public_html/apps/files_external/templates/settings.php

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1.JPG939×408 56.8 KB

Where add this $user .= “$”;
How can I fix it?

8

Sorry, my bad.
config.php is stored in /var/www/nextcloud/apps/files_external/lib/

In the newest version of files_external you have to replace line 295 in /var/www/nextcloud/apps/files_external/lib/config.php

Replace this line:
if (rtrim($option, '$') !== false) {

With this:
if (strpos(rtrim($option, '$'), '$') !== false) {

Credits to kesselb on github (https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/15567)

I hope that the developers include a checkbox in the future to choose if the share is hidden or not.
It’s always a good amount of luck if the patch works in the upcoming version, otherwise you have to search for a new solution. Not really that great if you deploy pre-configured environments to hundrets of customers.

9

Thx, works great.

10

@MS-PL:
Does it still work for you with the newest release?
I’m on 20.0.4 but hidden shares don’t seem to work anymore. At least for me.