Ubuntu 15.10: Some post installation fix

After upgrading my desktop computer to Ubuntu-Gnome 15.10 I went on with installing software packages I needed and it took me a while to notice there were problems in my network disk mounts. I had the configuration copied from the previously backed-up “fstab” configuration file. Everything was working fine before upgrading but in the new installation the system started with the configured Samba shares unavailable. Manually re-executing the mount sequence (with command “sudo mount -a”) solved the problem until next reboot.

I checked the system log and got the following error message:

…
Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 kernel: [ 20.826880] CIFS VFS: Error connecting to socket. Aborting operation.

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 kernel: [ 20.827770] CIFS VFS: Error connecting to socket. Aborting operation.

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 mount[680]: mount error(101): Network is unreachable

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 mount[680]: Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 kernel: [ 20.828593] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -101

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 systemd[1]: media-nas.mount: Mount process exited, code=exited status=32

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 systemd[1]: Failed to mount /media/nas.

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 systemd[1]: Dependency failed for Remote File Systems.

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 systemd[1]: remote-fs.target: Job remote-fs.target/start failed with result 'dependency'.

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 systemd[1]: media-nas.mount: Unit entered failed state.
…

Apparently, during the boot process, the system tried to mount network drives before the network was up and ready. I quickly discovered I wasn't alone with my problem, AskUbuntu pages offered some solutions. The first I tried, using the “_netdev” mount option in order to force the system to wait for the network to be ready, didn't work for me. The second solution has been configuring the network shares to be mounted only at the first access using “noauto” and “x-systemd.automount” mount options.

Here is how my “fstab” configuration looks like:

…
# NAS

//192.168.0.110/sh_maxx /media/nas cifs noauto,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=3,uid=maxx,credentials=/home/maxx/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

# Public

//192.168.0.110/public /media/public cifs noauto,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=3,guest,uid=maxx,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0
…

The network shares are now correctly mounted and there is no noticeable delay at first access. Only Nautilus seems to have been driven a little crazy about it since it shows drive icons doubled.

More work on the Raspberry PI

I've been working a little more on my Raspberry PI based server. After installing Minidlna server my Raspberry PI server needed some easy way to transfer media files into the USB disk. Sharing the disk with Samba has been, to me, the obvious solution. Also I installed the basis of a LAMP server (Apache2, MySQL, PHP5) for future installation of server applications.

Sharing a disk with Samba

The first step has been so installing samba from command line apt-get

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin

then I edited samba configuration file

sudo vim.tiny /etc/samba/smb.conf

where I added the definition instructions for sharing the USB disk

[usbdisk]

comment = Raspberry PI USB disk

path = /media/usbdisk

browsable = yes

guest ok = yes

read only = no

create mask = 0777

directory mask=0777

public= yes

only guest = no

force user = pi

force group = users

To keep things on the easy-to-use side I set the share for a public “guest” use without asking for passwords. Since my Raspberry server is still in a experimental status I don't have, not yet at least, many security worries to think about.

I tested the configuration with the testparm command

testparm /etc/samba/smb.conf

and eventually restarted the samba service.

sudo service samba restart

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