Mounting a permanent Samba share

I recently bought a network disks in order to use it as external storage for all my computers. I so immediately felt the need of an easier way to access to Samba shared folders. This is even more evident in my desktop computer where Xubuntu standard file manager (Thunar) doesn't even support Samba shared folders.

Mount a samba share in fstab

I decided to permanently mount the network disk shares configuration file, I followed this how-to from Ubuntu wiki with only a few changes.

I first installed smbfs file system

sudo apt-get install smbfs

then I prepared a credentials file in my home directory

sudo gedit .smbcredentials

inside I did write the network disk authentication user and password (different from my Linux user and password)

username=maxx

password=secret

I so changed access permissions to credentials file so that only root user could read it

sudo chmod 600 .smbcredentials

then I created the mount-point folder and let everyone access to it

sudo mkdir /media/nas

sudo chmod 777 /media/nas

then I edited the fstab file

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

and added the following line (all in one line)

//192.168.0.110/sh_maxx /media/nas cifs credentials=/home/maxx/.smbcredentials,dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777,umask=000,uid=maxx 0 0

where 192.168.0.110 is the (fixed) network drive address and sh_maxx is the samba share name.

At last I only had to execute the following command

sudo mount -a

Conclusions

I repeated these actions on all my three computers, at last I managed to have the networked folder content as easily available as to access to any other folder in the file system. All this only at the price some text file editing . Of course the network disk must be turned on before any computer but, if I forget to, it's only matter of executing the mount -a command.

Links

• Mount Windows Share Permanently