In this tutorial I will go over the steps need to mount a network share in Linux. The cifs-util suite is required in order to mount a network share, if the system you are working with lacks the suite this tutorial also covers the installation of the same. Like always the tutorial assumes you have root access or similar.
For every network share you wish to mount you need to specify a mount point just like we do with hard drives and USB drives. I would recommend creating the mount point in the /mnt directory.
mkdir /mnt/shares/share1
If the system you are working with lacks the cifs-util it can be installed using the package manager for your distribution. Ubuntu and Debian users can use apt-get.
apt-get install cifs-utils
Scientific Linux and CentOS users can use yum.
yum install cifs-utils
The basic command below will attempt to mount a network share with credentials, in this case the file server is a Windows Server 2003 and the client is a Ubuntu 12.04 server.
mount.cifs //192.168.1.107/share1/ /mnt/shares/share1/ -o user=user1,pass=user1password
Description:
To mount a public share or one that doesn’t require a password is even easier. All you are required to specify is the server IP address, share and mount point.
mount.cifs //192.168.1.107/share1/ /mnt/shares/share1/
Now that was easy, keep in mind that using the commands above will only result in the network shares being temporarily mounted, if the system were to be rebooted all mounted shares will be unmounted. If you would like to keep the network shares mounted even after a reboot you can acomplish this with the help of the fstab configuration file. Add the following line to the bottom of your fstab configuration file. Modify to fit your needs.
//192.168.1.129/share1 /mnt/shares/share1 cifs username=user1,password=user1password 0 0
Mount a network share in Linux doesn’t have to be a nightmare, as you saw above we are able to follow an organized process. I like it when there is minimal configuration files changes involved and the commands are easy to understand, as it was in the case for this tutorial. Thank you for reading, if you have any input or comments use the comment section below.