How can I fetch file metadata on cifs mounted folder?

Question

In our company we have a shared Windows folder. If I access it from Windows, I can pop up Properties menu of a file and find its metadata: who created it, last access times and so on.

On linux I have this folder mounted with mount -t cifs. I want to write a script which grabs some stats about folder usage.

Is there any way to access this metadata from linux?

UPD: I can't use getfacl, stat or ls -la for my task, because all those give me only the local linux username under which this folder is mounted, bot not names from Windows domain server.

UPD2: I mount the share with a command: sudo mount -t cifs //data/Shared /mnt/Shared -o uid=1000,gid=1000,user=<my_windows_account_name>,dom=<my_domain>,pass=<my_windows_password>, where uid=1000 and gid=1000 are uid and gid of my linux account.

Answer 1

You're using

mount -t cifs //data/Shared /mnt/Shared -o uid=1000,gid=1000,user=<my_windows_account_name>,dom=<my_domain>,pass=

What this tells the local system is two-fold:

1. Authenticate to to the remote server with the credentials specified as the tuple { user, domain, password }
2. Fake all accesses to/from the remote share as if they are from the user account with UID 1000 and GID 1000

You need to continue using #1, although I would strongly recommend that you move the user credentials into a secure file that can be read only by root and the local user representing the account credentials. See man mount.cifs for the details

# As root...
cat >/usr/local/etc/Shared.cifs <<'X'
username=my_windows_account_name
domain=my_domain
password=my_windows_password
X
chmod u=rw,go= /usr/local/etc/Shared.cifs
chown my_unix_account_name:root /usr/local/etc/Shared.cifs

# Then mount becomes
mount -t cifs //data/Shared /mnt/Shared -o credentials=/usr/local/etc/Share.cifs,noperm

However, you need to stop using #2 and instead have your local client understand the names used within the AD context. That's too much for here, but the essentials are these

• Install realmd and the samba dependencies
• Ensure your DNS servers are the AD domain servers (or local equivalents)
• Run realm discover to find and check that you can see the correct AD domain
• Run realm join {domain} to join to the domain

You will probably now want to deny logins from other AD users to your local system. The commands to review are variations of realm deny -all and realm permit --groups 'domain admins', along with AllowUsers and AllowGroups in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. If you're not a Domain Admin you'll need to change this accordingly. The man pages are quite good.

You can test that the join was successful with commands such as these

net ads testjoin
getent password my_windows_account_name    # As above
getent group "domain admins"               # An example group that will exist

Answer 2

The stat command can present file/directory timestamps, ownership and some other metadata in a way that is amenable to scripting: see man 1 stat for more info.

For permissions, especially for ACLs, getfacl is the command you need. For miscellaneous other attributes, there is getfattr.

If you want to know how much data is in a particular directory, including all its sub-directories, you'll need the du command.