How to properly mount a CIFS share on Linux for FileCloud

You might need to mount a CIFS network share on Linux so that FileCloud can use storage from devices over the network for both local storage and external shares.

Use these instructions to mount a CIFS share in a way that prevents FileCloud from encountering any permission issues.

Assumptions

Parameter	Value
Remote CIFS share path	//192.168.1.120/filecloud
Local mount path	/mnt/storage
CIFS user	username
CIFS password	password
Apache user uid	48. Note: check your server for the right uid
Apache user gid	48. Note: check your server for the right gid

Pre-requisites

Ensure the command mount.cifs is present in your distro. Here is the list of packages that provide this utility in different distros.

Required Packages

RHEL: cifs-utils

yum update -y
yum install cifs-utils

Mounting

Use the following command to mount the CIFS share:

mount -t cifs -
o username=username,password=password,uid=48,gid=48,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 //192.168.1.120/storage /mnt/storage

or if you have credential files at /root/.this-creds-file:

mount -t cifs -o credentials=/root/.the-creds-file,uid=48,gid=48,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 //192.168.1.120/storage

Auto Mounting

To perform auto mounting of a Windows share, create a password file, and use it in /etc/fstab. Follow the steps here:

Create a file /root/.smbcredentials with the following content.
```
username=filecloud
password=password 
```
Change the permissions such that only root can read the file.
```
chmod 700 /root/.smbcredentials
```

Now add the following line in /etc/fstab file.

//192.168.1.120/storage /mnt/storage        cifs    credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,uid=48,gid=48,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

Reload systemctl daemon.
```
systemctl daemon-reload
```
Test if the line added in the fstab file works.
```
mount -a
```
Now the remote share should be mounted at /mnt/storage.