CIFS mounting confusion

[Jareth007]

I've setup an fstab entry to enable not root users to mount a samba share, but ran into problems.

Here is the fstab entry
//server/share /mnt/share cifs suid,user,rw,credentials=/home/me/.fstabcred,sec=ntlmv2,uid=me,gid=users,noauto 0 0

As root, not problems. As user 'me', I received the following error:
mount error 1 = Operation not permitted

After much Googling, the only option was to chmod +s /usr/bin/mount.cifs and do the same for umount.cifs
It then worked. Great but I don't understand why the user option in the fstab didn't work.
A gentoo bug report covered the workaround, but I'm confused.

Can anyone explain why I still had to use suid bit on the mount/umount commands? Isn't this a security risk? Is there a better way to handle this?

Thanks!

[olli.bo]

Hi,
There may be wrong permissions on /mnt/share.

[Jareth007]

Before I tried to use the mount point, I made sure the owner was my user account and that the group was set to users.
Still trying to understand why I had to set the binaries to suid. Sounds bad, but I'm nervous with making those binaries user executable.

I'm not able to post my FSTAB tonight. I'll try to post tomorrow.