Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Mount a CIFS share via fstab

Have a CIFS share you want to mount on every boot? Tired of manually mounting? Don't like the hack-around of a startup script doing this for you? It's pretty easy to add this to your fstab file.
//<ip.address>/<share_name>       /mount/point       cifs       credentials=/path/to/.credentials_file,_netdev,iocharset=utf8,uid=<numeric user id>,gid=<numeric group id>,file_mode=0750,dir_mode=0750,rw     0 0
So let's go over some explanations for the above fstab line, at least for the parts that aren't self explanatory.
  • _netdev -- this option tells fstab that we don't want to try mounting this share until the network manager is running, probably a good idea since a cifs share is, naturally, mounted over the network!
  • iocharset -- the above might differ depending on the language your files are named with, play with this if you use a different character set (i.e. Cyrillic)
  • uid and gid -- setting these for the share determines who appears as the owner when you browse to the mount point, if you don't set these options root will appear to own the mount point and all the files in it, which is most likely not what you want! To find your user and group id's you can type "id <username>" in the terminal and it will print out the numeric id for your username and all the groups your id is member of
  • file_mode and dir_mode -- these determine the permissions of the mount point locally and they work just like any other user permissions on a unix system, the owner permissions will be relative to the uid you set and the group permissions will be relative to the gid you set. This means if you use the above example and have 5 for the group permissions and then, as a user other than uid and who isn't a part of gid, you try to write to the share, you'll get permission denied.
    • Note: even if you set permissions here to give you write access but the share source doesn't give you write permissions, you still won't be able to write to the share!
  • credentials -- this is a nice way to avoid posting your username and password directly in your fstab! For example, instead of using a credentials files you could put username=SomeUser,password=SomePassword right into the options and it would work, but that would expose your password to anyone who had viewing rights to the fstab file, which may not matter in the scheme of things for a private server, but it's still poor practice.
    • The contents of a credentials file is very simple, consider the below
      • username=SomeUser
      • password=SomePassword
    • Note: CIFS can be very sensitive to extra white spaces, so make sure each line ends with the end of your username / password and not a white space, also make sure that your file ends on the password line and not a blank line, this can be a good place to check if your mount is failing and you're sure that your login information is correct. Also, do not use quotation marks, this will cause login failures.

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