Downtown Doug Brown

At work, we still have a Windows 98 computer that we use for programming a few very old products that we no longer sell but still support. I tried to do some research so we could move this process onto a newer computer, but I wasn’t able to find a suitable tool. Thus, I’m stuck maintaining a Windows 98 computer until we no longer have to support the product. I do any necessary development work on a different computer, but I still need to get the program binaries onto the Windows 98 machine. The computer doesn’t have a floppy or CD drive, and Windows 98 didn’t come with a USB mass storage driver. Honestly, all of those solutions would be inconvenient for me anyway.

It’s super insecure, but you can enable file sharing on the Windows 98 computer and connect to it from Linux. Programming binaries to old microcontrollers is literally the only thing this computer is used for, so I’m not too concerned about the security pitfalls of SMB.

There are several tools designed for accessing an SMB share from Linux. Most modern desktop environments provide an interface to access Windows file shares. From the command line, I have used smbclient from Samba, which also works great in most situations. When we recently added subnets to our work network and the Windows machine was on a different subnet from my development machine, I had to come up with a solution to connect to it because it no longer showed up automatically. I didn’t want to set up a WINS server to enable cross-subnet Windows file sharing just for this one little application. I couldn’t get smbclient to connect to the Windows 98 computer properly across subnets in this scenario, so this blog post will focus on how to use Linux’s built-in CIFS support so you can use the standard “mount” command, which does work across subnets if you do it right.

First of all, you will need to ensure you have mount.cifs installed. In Ubuntu 16.04, you can type the following command to install it:

sudo apt install cifs-utils

Here is a sample mount command:

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.2.7/MYSHARE /tmp/windows -oservern=MYSERVER,guest,vers=1.0

Here is an explanation of each parameter:

• -t cifs
  • This specifies to the mount command that we’re trying to mount a CIFS share.
• //192.168.2.7/MYSHARE
  • This is the SMB server and share you are trying to mount. 192.168.2.7 is the IP address of the server. MYSHARE is the name of the share on the server. Note that I am using forward slashes here, not backslashes like you would expect on Windows.
• /tmp/windows
  • This is the local directory to mount the share on. Make sure you create the directory before trying to run this command.
• -oservern=MYSERVER…
  • “-o” specifies options. Everything following is a comma-separated list of options:
  • servern=MYSERVER
    • This option specifies that the name of the server you are connecting to is MYSERVER. You have to specify the name of the server you’re trying to connect to if you try to mount a Windows 98 share, or else it won’t work. So this option is super important.
  • guest
    • This specifies that we’re trying to connect as a guest. Otherwise, you can use the username= and password= options. It’s probably not a good idea to use the password= option though, because it leaves your password visible in plain text; there is a credentials= option that works a lot better by letting you specify a filename containing credentials.
  • vers=1.0
    • This tells the kernel to use the SMBv1 protocol. It used to be the default before Linux 4.13 came out, but now Linux defaults to a newer protocol for security reasons.

There are many other parameters that you may need to use for various reasons. You can get information about all of the available parameters by typing this command into your terminal:

man mount.cifs

Note that prior to Linux 4.13, I did not have to specify the protocol version as 1.0. It just worked. But with Linux 4.13 and later, it defaults to a newer protocol version for security reasons. If you try to connect to a Windows 98 share without specifying protocol version 1.0, the mount command will hang and eventually fail. I was able to determine what was going on by looking at a Wireshark trace, which then led me to the mount.cifs manpage to discover how to specify an older protocol version.

I have noticed that if you try to replace an existing file, you will get an error. So in my experience, you have to delete the existing file first. This is not a big deal in my use case.

To unmount it when you’re done:

sudo umount /tmp/windows

Hope this helps someone out there!