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Friday, May 29, 2009

Episode #42: Listing and Dropping SMB Sessions

Ed jumps:

On a Windows machine, sometimes an admin or user needs to see currently open SMB sessions going from or to their box, perhaps being used to mount a remote file share, get remote registry access, or otherwise plunder... ahem... I mean access the system.

To get a list of SMB sessions a Windows machines has opened to destination servers (which could be other Windows boxen or smbd's on Linux or Unix), you could run:

C:\> net use
New connections will be remembered.

Status Local Remote Network

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OK Z: \\10.1.1.105\c$ Microsoft Windows Network
The command completed successfully.
That shows you outbound SMB connections, those that your machine is acting as a client on. To flip things around and see who has opened an SMB session with your machine (i.e., to display who your box is acting as an SMB server to right now), you could run:
C:\> net session

Computer User name Client Type Opens Idle time

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
\\FRED ED Windows 2002 Serv 0 00:00:40

The command completed successfully.
Note that it shows me the client computer name and the user who has made the connection. The client type refers to the operating system that initiated the inbound session (Windows 2002 is how XP is depicted here). We also see idle time.

That's all well and good, but what if you run those commands and notice some evil SMB session either to or from your box? Perhaps there is an SMB session set up by a bad guy or unauthorized user, and you want to kick them out.

If you want to drop sessions from the client-side, you could run:
C:\> net use \\[ServerMachineName] /del
You'll be prompted about whether you really want to drop that connection. When prompted, hit Y and Enter. If you don't want to be prompted, just add a "/y" to the command above.

Or, if you want to blow away all SMB sessions that your client has initiated with server machines out there, you could run:
C:\> net use * /del /y
Now let's move to the server side. This one is important if you are responding to incidents in which a bad guy has opened an SMB session with one of your Windows servers, perhaps across your intranet. Maybe the server is vitally important, and you aren't allowed to pull the plug. Yet, you need to act fast to bump the bad guy off. Many Windows admins know how to do this at the GUI (launch compmgmt.msc, go to System Tools-->Shared Folders-->Sessions. Right click on evil session and select "Close session"). But, I find disconnecting SMB connections from the server-side much easier to do on the command line with:
C:\> net session \\[ClientMachineName] /del
That'll drop that pesky user and session, and keep your box running. You may want to disable that user account the bad guy relied on via the "net user [AccountName] active:no" command, as mentioned in Episode #34: Suspicious Password Entries.

It's interesting to notice the lack of symmetry with disconnecting client versus server SMB sessions. Dropping connections to servers with "net use" supports the * wildcard above, and supports the /y option to suppress the "Do you want to continue..." prompt. Dropping connections from clients supports neither the * nor does it prompt you to verify that you want to drop them.

Hal retorts:

Assuming your Unix/Linux distro has the smbfs tools from the Samba project installed, mounting and unmounting Windows shares from a client is pretty straightforward. You can either use the "smbmount" command or just "mount -t cifs ..." as root:

# mount -t cifs //server/hal /mnt -o user=hal,uid=hal,gid=hal   # mount and map ownerships
# umount /mnt # unmount file system

The "mount" command will prompt you to enter the password for the specified "user=" and then map all the owner/group owner settings on files based on the specified "uid="/"gid=" options.

Figuring out what Windows shares your client has mounted is straightforward too. You can use either "mount" or "df" (and you don't need to be root here):

$ mount -t cifs
//server/hal on /mnt type cifs (rw,mand)
$ df -t cifs
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
//server/hal 627661376 146659564 448604092 25% /mnt

The only caveat here is that the user GUI may provide an alternate method for mounting Windows shares that may make it more difficult to figure out all of the file systems a given system has mounted. For example, when I mount Windows shares via the Gnome-based GUI on my Ubuntu system, it uses GVFS to handle the mount. There's really very little helpful information you can get out of GVFS on the command-line:

$ mount -t fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/hal/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=hal)
$ df -t fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon
df: no file systems processed

The "mount" command tells me where the share is mounted, but not where it's mounted from. "df" has no clue at all. I hate GVFS.

So it may be more productive to interrogate your Samba server about what clients are currently accessing shares. You can use the "smbstatus" command on your Samba server host for this. What's interesting is that you don't have to be root to use "smbstatus". I'm not entirely certain that's a good thing, since it gives you information about other users' shares in addition to your own:

$ smbstatus 
Samba version 3.0.33-3.7.el5
PID Username Group Machine
-------------------------------------------------------------------
32752 hal hal elk (192.168.4.1)
32733 hal hal elk (192.168.4.1)
5320 laura laura wapiti (192.168.4.2)

Service pid machine Connected at
-------------------------------------------------------
hal 32733 elk Tue May 26 14:57:15 2009
laura 5320 wapiti Tue May 12 11:33:32 2009
iTunes 5320 wapiti Tue May 12 11:33:29 2009
hal 32752 elk Tue May 26 15:02:29 2009

No locked files

You can see I'm mounting my "hal" share twice (once from the command line with "mount -t cifs" and once via GVFS, though you can't tell that from the above output). My wife Laura has got her homedir mounted on her desktop machine, along with her iTunes music folder.

If you have root access, you can use the "smbcontrol" command to forcibly disable currently active shares. You can either disable particular shares by PID (see the "smbstatus" output above) or ruthlessly crush all systems mounting a particular share:

# smbcontrol 32733 close-share hal       # close a single share instance, PID 32733
# smbcontrol smbd close-share hal # nuke all clients mounting "hal"

It should be noted, however, that the disconnected user can simply re-mount the given share at will. So if you really want to keep them off the server you'll need to remove their account (or disable the password) before knocking them off with "smbcontrol".

One other item worth mentioning before I sign off this Episode is that the Samba tools also include a minimal version of the "net" command for your Unix/Linux systems. But many features are missing-- like "net use" for example. So I haven't found the Samba "net" command all that useful in general.