Mount Network Shares

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This page describes a method you can use to automatically mount a network share (samba/cifs, nfs, etc) in a directory on your SME server each time you boot up.

Assumptions

This Howto assumes:

• You will be mouning your shares into the info ibay
• You will be using cifs (smbfs or nfs should be similar)
• Your cifs server is named nas01
• You want to access two shares on nas01: share1 and share2
• You can successfully open \\nas01\share1 and \\nas01\share2 from windows using
  • username: joe
  • password: theplumber

Create the local mount points

First create the directories that will be used to host the mounted data. These directories should remain empty at all times.

cd /home/e-smith/files/ibays/info/html
mkdir share1
mkdir share2

Create a password file

In order for your SME server to mount a network share, it needs to know a valid username and password on the intended network server.

The most secure way to allow your SME server to login to a Windows (or other network) server is to place the required username and password information into a file on the disk, then set the permissions on that file so no one can read it who should not be able to.

I prefer to keep all such files in a folder under /root, as shown here:

mkdir /root/.passwd
echo "username=joe
password=theplumber
" > /root/.passwd/nas01
chmod 400 /root/.passwd/nas01

Modify the SME local event

You can schedule a program to run whenever your system boots by adding it to the e-smith local event. This event is executed by SME after all other boot processes have run, so the network, USB subsystem, etc should all be initialized and available.

The following commands will add a command to the local event that will mount a network share:

cd /etc/e-smith/events/local
echo "#! /bin/sh
/etc/rc.d/init.d/netfs start
mount -t cifs -o _netdev,credentials=/root/.passwd/nas01 //nas01/share1 /home/e-smith/files/ibays/info/html/share1
mount -t cifs -o _netdev,credentials=/root/.passwd/nas01 //nas01/share2 /home/e-smith/files/ibays/info/html/share2
" > S95netshares
chmod 755 S95netshares

Mounting

You can test your new mount script by running it:

/etc/e-smith/events/local/S95netshare

Or by executing the SME local event:

signal-event local

Or by rebooting

Un-Mounting

You can un-mount your network shares using

/etc/rc.d/init.d/netfs stop

Or by shutting down or rebooting

Testing

If all goes well, you should now be able to verify that your new script works as expected using one of these commands:

df -h	output should include lines beginning with //nas01/share1 and //nas01/share2
mount	output should include lines beginning with //nas01/share1 and //nas01/share2
/etc/rc.d/init.d/netfs status	Should return: Active CIFS mountpoints: /home/e-smith/files/ibays/info/html/share1 /home/e-smith/files/ibays/info/html/share2

Accessing your Data

Finally, you should be able to access your data in any of the following ways:

ls /home/e-smith/files/ibays/info/html/share1	should show the contents of //nas01/share1
ls /home/e-smith/files/ibays/info/html/share2	should show the contents of //nas01/share2
http://your-sme-server/info/share1	should show the contents of //nas01/share1
http://your-sme-server/info/share2	should show the contents of //nas01/share2

Notes and Warnings

1. The method describes gives access to //nas01/share1 and //nas02/share2 using the username and password placed into /root/.passwd/nas01. Once successfully mounted, this means that anyone who can browse to the info ibay will be able to access your data.
2. If you don't include /etc/rc.d/init.d/netfs start in your script, your system will lock up every time you shutdown. This is (in my opinion) a bug in CentOS (and hence will not be addressed by the SME developers). See Bug 4086 for more information.