Mounting a Windows Share in FC 10

[wt6g]

Simple Instructions and Info

Info:

Usually you put external mounts in the /mnt folder, then link there with a symbolic link if you want access from somewhere else. By keeping all of your mounts in /mnt its easier to manage them as your system and ability grow.

You need to make mounts as root. Mounts take the data in the target and put it on top of an existing folder. When you mount something on top of a folder whatever was there becomes invisible until you remove the mount on top of it. If there is a problem with a mount and it does not work, any writes to the mount will go to the folder underneath, and any data you expect to read from there will not exist.

In making a mount you should realize that the \ char requires an escape char in bash to show up in the final output to the command. The escape char is also \. Therefore to show \\ in a Windows command, you need to type \\\\. Also, spaces must be escaped once with \.

Howto:

# cd /mnt
# mkdir WindowsDocuments
# mount -t cifs \\\\10.10.9.5\\My\ Documents WindowsDocuments

You should substitute your ip or name for 10.10.9.5

Reminders:
Make sure your Windows folder is shared read/write if you need to write to it.
You probably want to change permissions on /mnt/WindowsDocuments to 777

Tips
If you want a link from your desktop to your Windows "My Documents" folder you can
now do this:

$cd ~/Desktop
ln -s /mnt/WindowsDocuments WindowsDocs

This will make a symbolic link to /mnt/Windows, and if you execute:
ls -l ~/Desktop you should see the links information in the response

Finally, if you want to keep a local backup of what's on the windows box in a local folder you could do:

mkdir ~/WindowsDocumentsBackup
rsync -avz ~/Desktop/WindowsDocs ~/WindowsDocumentsBackup

The ~ char is shorthand for /home/<uername> and represents your home folder.

The result of the rsync command is to make a copy of WindowsDocs (which points to your mount at /mnt/WindowsDocuments which is linked to your Windows machine shared 'My Documents' folder) and put it into ~/WindowsDocumentsBackup

As always, make use of the man command if you get confused or the info command for more detail. ie man rsync

Good luck.
/Len Umina
WT6G

[wt6g]

An update:

The following works quite well:

[root@mysystem ~]# mount.cifs //10.10.9.16/LensCommon /home/umina/Desktop/LensCommon -o credentials=/home/umina/credentialsLensCommon

In the plain text file credentialsLensCommon I have the following on the first two lines:

username=myusername
password=mypassword

The reason to use a credentials file is simply security. If its in your home you can set permissions to protect it.

To unmount the cifs share in the above example:

# umount.cifs /home/umina/LensCommon

you can find help by using "man mount.cifs" at the command line.
according to data found in "man mount" you must have the cifs-mount package installed.
(it was already in my system)