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 server can use storage from devices over the network for both local storage as well as external shares.

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

Assumptions

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.

user@host:~$ sudo apt-get update
user@host:~$ sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

Mounting

Use the following command to mount the CIFS share

user@host:~$ mount -t cifs -o username=username,password=password,uid=33,gid=33,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
user@host:~$ mount -t cifs -o credentials=/root/.the-creds-file,uid=33,gid=33,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 //192.168.1.120/storage /mnt/storage

Auto Mounting

To perform auto mounting of windows share, you need to create a password file and use that in /etc/fstab. Follow the steps here:

1. Create a file /root/.smbcredentials with the following content.

   Command Line

   username=winuser
   password=winpass
   

   Here winuser and winpass are the username and password for the remote CIFS share.

2. Change the permissions such that only root can read the file.

   Command Line

   # sudo chmod 700 /root/.smbcredentials
   

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

   Command Line

   //192.168.1.120/storage /mnt/storage        cifs    credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,uid=33,gid=33,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0
   

4. Test if the line added in the fstab file works.

   Command Line

   # sudo mount -a
   

   Now the remote share should be mounted at /mnt/storage.