How to properly mount a CIFS share on RHEL for FileCloud

You might need to mount a CIFS network share on Linux so that FileCloud can use storage from devices over the network for both local storage and external shares.

Use these instructions to mount a CIFS share in a way that prevents FileCloud from encountering any permission issues. 

Assumptions

Prerequisites

Ensure the command mount.cifs is present in your distro. Here is the list of packages that provide this utility in different distros.

Required Packages

RHEL: cifs-utils

yum update -y
yum install cifs-utils

Mounting

Use the following command to mount the CIFS share:

mount -t cifs -
o username=username,password=password,uid=48,gid=48,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 //192.168.1.120/storage /mnt/storage

or if you have credential files at /root/.this-creds-file:

mount -t cifs -o credentials=/root/.the-creds-file,uid=48,gid=48,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 //192.168.1.120/storage

Auto Mounting

To perform auto mounting of a Windows share, create a password file, and use it in /etc/fstab. Follow the steps here:

1. Create a file /root/.smbcredentials with the following content.

   CODE

   username=filecloud
   password=password 

2. Change the permissions such that only root can read the file.

   CODE

   chmod 700 /root/.smbcredentials
   

3. Now add the following line in /etc/fstab file.

   CODE

   //192.168.1.120/storage /mnt/storage        cifs    credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,uid=48,gid=48,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0 

4. Reload systemctl daemon.

   CODE

   systemctl daemon-reload

5. Test if the line added in the fstab file works.

   CODE

   mount -a
   

   Now the remote share should be mounted at /mnt/storage.