Mounting a Windows Share in Linux

Linux systems allow access to Windows and Samba file shares. cifs (formerly smbfs) is used for this purpose.

Mounting Shares using cifs

You can connect to a Windows share from the command line of a Linux system as shown below.

First you have to install the cifs-utils package. Use the following command under Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

The following example values will be used in this example:

• IP address for the server: 192.168.1.100
• Share name: freigabe
• User name: testuser
• Domain: testdomain

To mount the network share, use the following command and enter the password of the user:

admin@adminpc-ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.100/freigabe /mnt -o user=testuser
Password:

Troubleshooting Disconnects

In the event of unintentional disconnects, it may be helpful to explicitly use a newer protocol version (e. g. vers=2.1). You will find information on this in a post on stackexchange.com.

smbfs

smbfs should not be used, however you will find several pieces of information about it here for historical reasons:

An attempt to use smbfs will fail with the following message:

admin@adminpc-ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t smbfs //192.168.1.100/freigabe /mnt -o username=testuser
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //192.168.1.100/operating-systems,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       (for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might
       need a /sbin/mount.<type> helper program)
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

admin@adminpc-ubuntu:~$

The output from dmesg will appear in this case:

[18427.113492] smbfs is deprecated and will be removed from the 2.6.27 kernel. Please migrate to cifs
[18427.113499] smb_fill_super: missing data argument
[18539.255884] smbfs is deprecated and will be removed from the 2.6.27 kernel. Please migrate to cifs
[18539.255891] smbfs: mount_data version 1919251317 is not supported

So that smbfs can be used, the smbfs package will be required under Ubuntu.

Additional Information

• http://www.samba.org/cifs/
• Samba Client cifs (wiki.ubuntuusers.de)