I want to mount a remote Samba share, making use of extended attributes. The server has "ea support = yes" and an XFS filesystem (which supports xattrs). I attempt to mount with mount.cifs //server/share /mnt -o user_xattr,credentials=... but this gives the curious error message username specified with no parameter which I get no matter how I specify the username/password information. If you look where this comes from in mount.cifs.c, the error seems rather spurious; it seems to be noticing the first four letters of the "user_xattr" option, and inferring that this must have something to do with authentication.
reported against mount.cifs in Samba 3.0.11
user_xattr is not needed in order to enable xattr support for cifs vfs (it is an ext2/ext3/reiserfs specific mount option as far as I can tell) but I added it (nouser_xattr will turn it off at mount, user_xattr basically ignored since it is on by default if xattrs are built). The change is in the cifs.bkbits.net/linux-2.5cifs version (will be in mm soon) of the cifs.ko kernel code and also a corresponding change in the user space mount.cifs.c in the SAMBA_3_0/source/client/mount.cifs.c
I misread the smb.conf(5) man page blurb on the "ea support" directive, w.r.t. which side of the client/server equation needs user_xattr =] Scratch one confusing error message, at any rate. Thanks.