File shares

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:

//fs01mixedsmb.wurnet.nl/DBL-STANDARD_HOMEDIR$/myuser	/mnt/mdrive	cifs	noauto,user,username=myuser,domain=wur,uid=mylocaluser,gid=mylocalgroup	0	0

(Replace myuser with your own WUR account name, and mylocaluser/mylocalgroup with the account/group 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:

//fs01mixedsmb.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.

echo username=username > ~/.smbpassword

echo password=mypassword >> ~/.smbpassword

chmod 600 ~/.smbpassword

Automatically mounting when users login (pam_mount)

apt-get install libpam-mount cifs-utils

Create or edit pam_mount.conf.xml in /etc/security

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE pam_mount SYSTEM "pam_mount.conf.xml.dtd">
<!--
	See pam_mount.conf(5) for a description.
-->

<pam_mount>

		<!-- debug should come before everything else,
		since this file is still processed in a single pass
		from top-to-bottom -->

<debug enable="0" />

		<!-- Volume definitions -->


		<!-- pam_mount parameters: General tunables -->

<luserconf name=".pam_mount.conf.xml" />

<!-- Note that commenting out mntoptions will give you the defaults.
     You will need to explicitly initialize it with the empty string
     to reset the defaults to nothing. -->
<mntoptions allow="*" />
<!--
<mntoptions allow="nosuid,nodev,loop,encryption,fsck,nonempty,allow_root,allow_other" />
<mntoptions deny="suid,dev" />
<mntoptions allow="*" />
<mntoptions deny="*" />
-->
<mntoptions require="nosuid,nodev" />

<logout wait="0" hup="0" term="0" kill="0" />

<!-- pam_mount parameters: Volume-related -->

<mkmountpoint enable="1" remove="true" />

</pam_mount>

Create a .pam_mount.conf.xml file in each users home directory.

 
<pam_mount>
	<volume options="domain=WUR,nodev,nosuid" user="*" mountpoint="~/M" path="Homes/%(USER)" server="WURNET.NL" fstype="cifs" />
	<volume options="domain=WUR,nodev,nosuid" user="*" mountpoint="~/W" path="DFS-Root" server="WURNET.NL" fstype="cifs" />
</pam_mount>

And then create the directories in the users homedir.

mkdir ~/M

mkdir ~/W

You can use skel to automatically put it in users home dir when creating a new user. If you want this then place the .pam_mount.conf.xml file in /etc/skel/ and create the M and W directory in /etc/skel

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:

//WURNET.NL/DFS-Root	/mnt/wdrive	cifs	noauto,user,username=username,domain=wur	0	0

Should work.

With newer versions of smbclient it could happen that it needs a version specified in the mount options because the default version is not working. Then try it with version 1.0

//WURNET.NL/DFS-Root	/mnt/wdrive	cifs	noauto,user,username=username,domain=wur,vers=1.0	0	0