At the moment i have a mandrake laptop and a bunch of Fedora boxes,, which have been recently upgraded to fedora from misc. windows versions.

The transition from smbmount to mount -t cifs is being a PITA- time to explain

On the mandrake laptop I mount all my user shares from a bash script in ~/.kde/autostart. The reasoning behind this is 1) my shares get mounted on kde startup 2) my passwords for the other boxen on the network are only viewable by me.

On the Fedora boxes, i have to mount smb shares using "mount -t cifs" whihc requires root privalges. Does anyone know a way i can mount these shares with normal user privalages.

The important thing for me is not having to do anything manually to get into my networks shares, whilst protecting the passwords of my network shares from casual viewing. The example being if i have the passwords in my fstab, and i happen to create a user account for someone i don't want to have access to my mp3 repositories, they can find out the passwords through cat /etc/fstab.... you get the idea

You can add your Samba shares to your /etc/fstab and there's an option you can put in fstab called credentials that you can set to a file with the username and password for the share -- for instance in my fstab I have:

//othersystem/home /mnt/othersystem smbfs credentials=/etc/credfile 0 0

and them make /etc/credfile only readable/writeable by root. Then your Samba filesystem should be mounted automatically on boot.

That's rather cool
Thanks!

Is there a way to make another attempt to mount a network share included in fstab in case the machines you're trying to mount to are down when the system starts up, would adding the tag "user" in there allow user mounts?

And would adding the "noauto" tag along with the "user" tag allow users to mount and unmount the share at will, and supply their own credentials??

Got it: I use autofs to mount the smb shares on demand

autofs seems mighy cool and the embodyment of the GSPE - Geeks Society for the Presevation of Effort

Check out: http://freespace.sourceforge.net/gui...to/autofs.html
http://www.linux-consulting.com/Amd_AutoFS/autofs.html

Hi:
We are trying to mount a windows directory which is shared as ABC_DEF using the mount.cifs or mount -t CIFS but for some reason it gives an error saying NOT A DIRECTORY. When we try to mount another directory called TEMP it does perfectly. I do not know what the deal is. Can anyone help me with this.
Is this any problem with the "_" symbol. Please let me know because we cannot change the share name because it is being referenced through out the Institute.
mounting was workin fine with smbmount before but now after upgrading samba no longer supports SMB signing so we had to shift to CIFS. For some silly reason it does not seem to work.
regards
Chethan

the _ shouldn't be a problem.
Are you sure the directory you're trying to conenct to is a real shared directory, not a DFS link to a directory (on a win2k domain) or in fact a PC on it's own?

Something to try as an easy way round it all, do you have nautilus at your disposal? If you do try opening the location 'smb:' and browsing to it. That may give oyu soem clues, and is an easy way to figure it all out.

try smbclient -L //NAME_OF_SERVER to browe the shares on the server, use the manpage to fugure out the options if you need to supply any more, as they're a bit different to those used by mount.

SMB signing is no longer supported that means smbtree nor smbclient gonna work. But the problem with the mounting was that just some stupid rights issue. We had to add Everyone in the Security rights of the share. All i did was compare the share that was loading and share that was not and made the rights similar. Only missing was Everyone. I added that and it started working. Anyways thanks a lot for the response
regards
Chethan Channappa