TAS smb-broker password restrictions

Products

• VMware Tanzu Platform Core

Issue/Introduction

TAS smb-broker fails to mount with error 

"failed to mount volume, errors: - validation mount options failed: mount option 'password' contains invalid character '='\n",

Environment

TAS/EAR smb-broker

Cause

TAS SMB volume driver connects to the share by passing a comma-separated string of configuration options to the system's mount command (for example: username=admin,password=my=password).

Because the equals sign (=) is used as the delimiter to separate the key from the value, an = inside the password itself breaks the parser. To prevent the mount command from failing or misinterpreting the string, the TAS validation layer explicitly rejects the = character upfront.

The characters not accepted are (,) and (=) as shown in https://github.com/cloudfoundry/smb-volume-release/blob/19fd9832fe891ab9051b91721b67d6f2321effa5/src/code.cloudfoundry.org/smbdriver/smb_mounter_unix.go#L149 

Resolution

Do not use comma (,) or equals (=) sign in password for smb volumes.