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Mounting SMB share on Debian

You might be running a NAS sever on your local network or sharing some drive on different windows PC that you want to access on your linux server/desktop. In this post, we will learn how to auto mount on your machine with different access level.

Server Message Block (SMB) is a communication protocol originally developed in 1983 by Barry A. Feigenbaum at IBM. SMB enables file sharing, printer sharing, network browsing, and inter-process communication (through named pipes) over a computer network. SMB serves as the basis for Microsoft's Distributed File System implementation. SMB relies on the TCP and IP protocols for transport. This combination allows file sharing over complex, interconnected networks, including the public Internet.

Step-1: Cifs-utils Package installation​

Insall Samba and CIFS utils.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install smbclient cifs-utils

Step-2: Check servers and mounts​

For this article we will assume that server ip is 192.168.123.456.

smbclient -L //192.168.123.456

This should list all the visible servers and shares.

$ smbclient -L //192.168.123.456
Password for [WORKGROUP\username]:

    Sharename       Type      Comment
    ---------       ----      -------
    data            Disk      data and downloads
    home            Disk      Home directory of username
SMB1 disabled -- no workgroup available

Step-3: Creating Directory​

We will now create directory for mounting the shared drive:

sudo mkdir /media/share

Or if we want to mount for the current user only:

sudo mkdir ~/share

Step-4: Creating Credentials file​

Instead of putting our username and password everywhere we will create a credentials file. In this example we will use nano editor but you can use any editor.

sudo nano /root/.servercred

Now we will enter username as password. You can also give domain like WORKGROUP but usually it's optional.

username=<server-username>
password=<server-password>
domain=value (optional)

Press CTRL+S to save the file and CTRL+X to exit from the nano editor.

sudo chmod 400 /root/.servercred

Step-5: Mounting share​

In this step we will assume that server ip is 192.168.123.456.

sudo mount -t cifs -o rw,vers=3.0,credentials=/root/.servercred //192.168.123.456/sharedDir /media/share

Above command gives only root to read and write. But if we want to give the write access to local user then we need to provide uid.

sudo mount -t cifs -o rw,vers=3.0,credentials=/root/.servercred,uid=12345 //192.168.123.456/sharedDir /media/share

To unmount we can use:

sudo unmount -l /media/share

Step-6: Auto Mounting​

For this to automatically mount we need to update fstab.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Append the config in the file, save and exit.

//192.168.123.456/sharedDir /media/share cifs rw,vers=3.0,credentials=/root/.servercred

First published on 2023-05-16