Mount a CIFS Share on Ubuntu 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

Parameter	Value
Remote CIFS share path	//192.168.1.120/storage
Local mount path	/mnt/storage
CIFS user	username
CIFS password	password
Apache user uid	33. Note: check your server for the right uid
Apache user gid	33. 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

Ubuntu: cifs-utils

Installing cifs-utils in Ubuntu

PowerShell

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

Mounting

Use the following command to mount the CIFS share

Command Line

PowerShell

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:

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

Command Line
PowerShell
```
username=winuser
password=winpass
```
Here winuser and winpass are the username and password for the remote CIFS share.
Change the permissions such that only root can read the file.

Command Line
PowerShell
```
# sudo chmod 700 /root/.smbcredentials
```

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

Command Line

PowerShell

//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

Test if the line added in the fstab file works.

Command Line

PowerShell

# sudo mount -a
If you are getting any error while mounting like " host not found ", add version as below at the end of dir_mode=0777 as shown in the below//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,vers=3.0 0 0

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