Smbmount

The program smbmount is used to mount a network drive, using the Server Message Block (SMB) network protocol. It is a part of the open-source Samba suite. smbmount is identical in functionality as using "mount -t smbfs". In fact, when using the "mount" option it passes the command to smbmount for execution, just as "mount -t cifs" calls mount.cifs.

Most operating systems require root permissions to mount a network drive. If you receive a (Access denied) or other equivalent error message change to root user and try again. When the share is mounted it will use the root user id by default, meaning you will be unable to read/write the share as any other user. To allow other users/groups to utilize the share use the command line option "-o uid=userid,gid=groupid" . By default, there is no support for large file systems. To allow support for LFS use the command line option "-o lfs".

If the network drive that you're trying to mount is on a computer that is part of a domain, you will need to directly specify it with the 'workgroup' setting. This can be set via a command line option "-o workgroup=domain", or it can be set in the /etc/samba/smb.conf file under the WORKGROUP global setting tag.

A complete command looks like the following: smbmount //server/share /localdir -o username=user,password=pass,uid=500,gid=500

smbclient cannot mount share subdirectories directly, so may use //server/share and not //server/share/subdir.

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 smbmount command has been replaced by [http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount.cifs mount.cifs]

External links

* [http://www.samba.org/ Samba web site]
* [http://linux.die.net/man/8/smbmount man smbmount]
* [http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Smbmount Linux Wiki - smbmount]