Samba – Where to Find the Mount Point for SMB Shares in Ubuntu 13.04

fstabmountnautilussamba

In older Ubuntu releases, you were able to access the SMB shares mounted with Nautilus by going into the ~/.gvfs/ directory. I found it very convenient, since I like to use Nautilus to mount the shares, but do all disk operations (copy, mv, find etc.) using command line.

I now have Ubuntu 13.04, and even though I can mount the share and use it with Nautilus (which I never use), I am unable to find the actual mount point. Is it still somewhere? Or has it been abandoned? Can I get it back?

I know that I can mount the shares using CIFS and /etc/fstab, but I'd rather use the user space. That way, when I install a new system or transfer my home to another machine, my preferences (including credentials) stay in my home directory and I don't need to worry about updating fstab.

Also, I do not want to mount it manually with sudo (with sudo mount -t cifs ...). Yes, I could create an alias or a script, but then I would have to either type my password every time or store my password in a credentials file. And type the sudo password. And then each time I encounter a new share, I'd need to remember how to create a credentials file. So yes, I might end up with this solution, but I would rather not change my current habits, if it is possible.

Furthermore, there is the matter of other users for which I often provide a simple command-line solution. In 13.04, this is no longer possible (for example, because the users to whom I provide the solution are not allowed to sudo mount on their machines).

In any case, I'm curious as to what happened to gvfs and why I can't see the mounted directories.

Best Answer

In 13.04, gvfs user-mounts are moved to the /run filesystem

/run/user/<username>/gvfs

see Why do my gvfs mounts not show up under ~/.gvfs or /run/user/<login>/gvfs?

[not flagged as duplicate because the answers there are unclear]

If you want to keep the old links / scripts etc., just do

rmdir ~/.gvfs/
ln -s /run/user/<username>/gvfs ~/.gvfs

Update: gvfs has been deprecated, use 'gio mount' instead. Now smb mounts are located on $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/gvfs.

Use automount + multiuser option of mount.cifs

You can achieve this using automount and the multiuser option for mount.cifs. Install the required packages:

sudo apt install autofs keyutils cifs-utils

The following example assumes that the cifs server exports a share that is named after the user that is accessing it. Normally that would be suitable for home directories.

Add this to your /etc/auto.master:

/cifs /etc/auto.cifs

In /etc/auto.cifs put this:

*   -fstype=cifs,multiuser,cruid=${UID},sec=krb5    ://server.domain/&

Make sure to replace server.domain by your file server. You could also use a fixed share this way. Just replace the * by a fixed name and also the &.

An important detail in the above configuration is the cruid=${UID}. It will make the kernel look for a kerberos ticket in the context of the user accessing the share. Otherwise it would be trying roots ticket cache.

Finally reload automount:

sudo service autofs reload

If you have a kerberos ticket, it will mount the file system /cifs/$USER on first access. That means you need to explicitly type e. g. cd /cifs/myuser or a similar action in a GUI file browser. To avoid this you could place symbolic links pointing to this from somewhere else and tell users to access those.

If you are using a fixed share (not using * and &) of course you would have to type cd /cifs/sharename.

Subsequent access by other users to the same share will be using their permissions, made possible by the multiuser option. No additional mount will be made but the existing one reused.

From mount.cifs(8):

   multiuser
       Map user accesses to individual credentials when accessing
       the server. By default, CIFS mounts only use a single set of
       user credentials (the mount credentials) when accessing a
       share. With this option, the client instead creates a new
       session with the server using the user's credentials whenever
       a new user accesses the mount. Further accesses by that user
       will also use those credentials. Because the kernel cannot
       prompt for passwords, multiuser mounts are limited to mounts
       using sec= options that don't require passwords.

It is also possible to add the required automount maps to an LDAP server for central management, but this is probably beyond the scope of this answer.

In your question you asked for the mount to be mounted as root on boot. Technically this is done here in form of a place holder mount for autofs. Practically the real mount is only done on first access by a user.

We are using this setup for ~100 clients at my workplace for accessing quite a big lustre file system and it works reliably.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Slow gvfs SMB Performance

Ubuntu – CIFS mounts and Kerberos – permissions on access or best practice

Use automount + multiuser option of mount.cifs

Related Question