Page History

In this guide you'll learn how to mount a CIFS/SMB share on Ubuntu. Make sure you have your FTP SMB server and credentials ready.

I wrote this guide when creating a shared folder for the GamePanel server so that it can place backups of the game servers on there.I advise you run the following as the root user. Especially step 4!

1. Installing package

sudo apt install cifs-utils

2. Create a folder

This is the folder where you will mount the share to.

sudo mkdir /mnt/backups

3. Add entry to fstab

Open your fstab file (/etc/fstab). And add something like this to the bottom of the file.

//SERVER_IP_ADDRESS/SHARE_NAME  /mnt/backups  cifs  username=msusername,password=mspassword,iocharset=utf8  0  0

You will note that you have enter the password and username here. This is not advisable since the fstab file is readable by all users. Will fix this in the next step.

4. Not having our password in the fstab file

RUN THIS AS ROOT! Make this file in the home folder of root (by default /root). Why? Because only root can access this folder or privileged users. This makes sure that other people cannot access the credentials file.

So create and open the file /root/.smbcredentials using vim or nano. (Eg sudo vi /root/.smbcredentials)

username=msusername
password=mspassword

Save and close and then set the permissions that only root can read it.

sudo chmod 600 /root/.smbcredentials

You can verify it by writing:

sudo ls -al /root/.smbcredentials

If everything is correct you should see this:

Now open up your fstab again and replace the username and password with credentials=/root/.smbcredentials.
Your file should look like this:

//SERVER_IP_ADDRESS/SHARE_NAME  /mnt/backups  cifs  credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8  0  0

5. Actually mounting

If you reboot the folder will be mounted automatically. Of course we can manually mount it by entering the command

sudo mount -a