As already suggested in a mail to Steve French by another user, cifs vfs should support plain text passwords. I would be happy to see this enhancement and to test patches which implement this in our rather complex environment. I would prefer to see this as an selectable option in the kernel configuration. This would allow distributors to select their default policy and advanced admins to change this themselves. Thanks in advance and greetings Ulrich Gemkow
the new session setup routine for cifs vfs in fs/cifs/ntlmssp.c in cifs-2.6.git tree on kernel.org should be updated with this code (for plain text password support) within a few days. It will require a make menuconfig option (or #define) since these are weak passwords and will require a runtime mount or /proc/fs/cifs setting as well - so we don't accidently use weak passwords over the wire
Thanks a lot!
Current cifs vfs in cifs-2.6.git on kernel.org is very close to supporting this
fixed