cifs automount not happening -- and an incomplete workaround

pwabrahams · 05-07-2009, 11:26 PM

I have the same problem as a number of other people, running Kubuntu Jaunty as well as OpenSuSE 11.1: the CIFS entries in /etc/fstab don't get automounted. The cause, I know, is that it takes a while for the network connections to get established, and the mount command is issued during the startup ceremonies before the necessary connection exists. The same problem can occur for NFS mounts.

The solution, I believe, is to put something in /etc/rc.local like this:

Code:

(
while mounts are incomplete do
  mount -a
  sleep 10
done
)&

The problem I have is that I don't know how to test within the script whether the mounts are incomplete. The purpose of the & is to enable the startup sequence to continue even while waiting for the mounts, though for some people that might not be desirable.

blacky_5251 · 05-08-2009, 07:47 PM

The solution in RHEL, CentOS and Fedora is to use the _netdev syntax in /etc/fstab, viz:-

Code:

//marvin/FaxReceived    /marvin/faxes           cifs    _netdev,credentials=/etc/samba/cred.txt 0 0

This tells the operating system that the mount is remote and may not be available, so the boot process doesn't wait for it to be mounted before continuing on.

pwabrahams · 05-09-2009, 12:00 AM

Does _netdev work with CIFS? The man page doesn't list it as an option.

blacky_5251 · 05-09-2009, 04:30 AM

Depends on which man page you look at I guess. "man mount" shows it, but "man mount.cifs" doesn't. It seems to work for me, so does it not work for you? Our Linux servers stay up so much longer than the Windows servers that it is rarely put to the test.

pwabrahams · 05-10-2009, 10:00 PM

Including _netdev on my OpenSUSE 11.1 system causes the CIFS mount to happen without intervention, but on my Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty system, it doesn't. I wonder why. Here's the fstab entry for Kubuntu:

Code:

//hpmediavault/FileShare /mediavault cifs user,auto,rw,nodev,noexec,_netdev,guest 0 0

rehdwolfe · 07-31-2009, 05:39 PM

I had a problem with similar symptoms.

Mounting CIFS filesystem: error 13 opening credential file /etc/samba/cred.txt

my /etc/fstab entry was as follows:

//<ipaddress>/share /opt/server cifs credentials=/etc/samba/cred.txt 0 0

The resolution for me was related to SELINUX. My SELINUX was set to enforcing. I launched sealert -b and found that selinux was preventing access to /sbin/mount.cifs.

SELINUX prevented /sbin/mount.cifs from mounting on the file or directory "cred.txt".

It suggested that I could either relabel the directory or set the following boolean.

setsebool -P allow_mount_anyfile=1

What I did instead was to move my cred file to /etc/cred.txt (instead of /etc/samba/cred.txt) so it would pick up the context of /etc instead of /etc/samba.

This worked for me.