File shares

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Mounting Home Directories - CIFS

As WUR has moved to a new home directory storage method, the path to finding it is much simpler:

Write yourself an /etc/fstab entry that looks like this:

  • //WURNET.NL/Homes/username /mnt/mdrive cifs noauto,user,username=username,domain=wur,uid=localuser,gid=localuser 0 0

(Replace username with your own WUR account name, and localuser with the account you have locally)

Now you can simply:

mount /mnt/mdrive

And after entering your password, you have access to your M drive share.

Caveats

This may occasionally not work on the first try, as the hostname WURNET.NL points to multiple machines. You may need to do this repeatedly to get a stable connection.

Other Shares

The easiest way to gather information about available CIFS shares is using smbclient. On Ubuntu, you need the pacakge 'smbclient' to provide this.

Usage:

  • smbclient -L <server> -U username

This will show you all the mounts available to you on that machine.

To test the mount:

  • sudo mount //server/share -ousername=username,domain=wur /tmp/smb

This will hold until you unmount it.

Automatically mounting at boot (/etc/fstab)

The above example will only mount when called. You want it to mount on boot. However, a simple issue is present - you must authenticate to mount. Thus, you need to have some credential stash. Modify the options to this:

  • //WURNET.NL/Homes/username /mnt/mdrive cifs credentials=/home/localuser/.smbpassword,user,username=username,domain=wur,uid=localuser,gid=localuser 0 0

Then you can make the credential file. Set it 600 so that only you or root may read or write.

  • cd ~
  • echo username=username > .smbpassword
  • echo password=password >> .smbpassword
  • chmod 600 .smbpassword


What is the DFS-Root

DFS is Microsoft's Distributed File System. The purpose of a distributed file system is that the user can access files without knowing on which server the files are locates. The root of a distributed files system is called the DFS-Root. In the DFS-Root are virtual directories which are actual 'links' to shares on some servers.

Most modern CIFS implementations are able to handle DFS properly, thus a config like:

  • //scomp0863/DFS-Root /mnt/wdrive cifs noauto,user,username=username,domain=wur 0 0

Should work.