Example of cfis fstab

There are more than one ways to do this. This example uses cifs to permanently mount the shares so that they will be available after reboot. If the system complains add the 'noauto' parameter.

• First edit your /etc/hosts file and add the hostname and IP address of the windows share or file server
• Next create mount points in /mnt for each windows share
• Make sure you have cifs installed
• Edit /etc/fstab and add a line for each windows share, see examples:

//apollo/public/ /mnt/public cifs username=nicolep,password=mythtv,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm  0  0
//apollo/media/ /mnt/media cifs username=nicolep,password=mythtv,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm  0  0
//apollo/video/ /mnt/video cifs username=nicolep,password=mythtv,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm  0  0

• mount the shares

mount -a

• This provides read-only access to the network shares.

KERNEL CHANGE BREAKS CIFS.

Somewhere between kernel 4.10.0-38 4.15.0-20 a change was made that COULD PREVENT your cifs shares from mounting. Kernels at and before 4.10 used SMB (Server Message Block) version 1.0 as the default if not specified. Most folks did not specify it so it defaulted to 1.0 and worked. Microsoft ditched 1.0 in Windows 10 and dropped support. Linux kernel developers decided to change the kernel code to no longer default to SMB 1.0 and now default to a newer version. For people that are using legacy networks or NAS devices, it breaks the mounting example from above.

Solution: Specify the SMB version.

The solution is to tell mount.cifs to use the SMB2, SMB2.1 or SMB3.0 protocol:

mount -t cifs ... -o vers=3.0,...

For the following full line example a linux desktop is connecting to an older NAS device. It is necessary to specify SMB version 1.0. Example:

//apollo/video/ /mnt/video cifs defaults,vers=1.0,domain=workgroup,username=nicolep,password=mythtv,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm 0 0

or vers=2.1 or vers=2.0.