"Can't resolve mount point ..." - Mandrake 9.2 to WinXP host
 

Hi. New Linux user here: Mandrake 9.2 running on VMWare under Windows XP Pro SP1. I am a very experienced Windows user and I have a brain but I am new to Linux. Networking is all configured and running properly, DNS etc works, so I am convinced this is a viable installation despite the weirdness of it being under VMWare.

Problem: I'm trying to mount a share on a Windows machine (not the VMWare host) in the Linux machine. I keep getting the message "Can't resolve mount point /mnt/vmtools"

What I have done so far:

Created share called "vmt" on Windows machine, permissioned for Everyone / Full Control. Machine is called "bart". Share can be accessed as \\bart\vmt from Windows.

In console window in Linux typed "su -" and logged in then typed:

mount -t smbfs -o username=user,password=password //bart/vmt /mnt/vmtools

Then got the error message as above "Can't resolve mount point /mnt/vmtools".

So after some thought and some googling I created a directory /mnt/vmtools... and got the same error.

So after more thought I did a "chmod 777 /mnt/vmtools" in case it was a permissions thing but get same error.

Next I edited /etc/fstab putting in this line:

//bart/vmt /mnt/vmtools smbfs noauto,rw,username=user 0 0

(because I found it with google as a suggested solution). But I still get the same error. However! Now if I remove the directory /mnt/vmtools I get "mount: can't find /mnt/vmtools in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab"

I am now very confused :-)

- Are you supposed to create the mount point as a directory before you mount it, or not?

- Do you have to put the entry in /etc/fstab or not?

- Help! What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for any help offered.


funcii

I forgot to mention that I can ping bart from the console on the linux machine.

Ok I've sorted this out. Along the way I discovered:

- You can't use //server/share for a windows share, you have to use \\server\share like in Windows. And if you do it on the command line you have to escape the backslash with another backslash, like this: \\\\server\\share. However if you do it in fstab you don't have to escape it;
- You MUST create the directory before you can mount something into it;
- You don't have to put the entry in the fstab file but if you want it to load every boot then it's advisable (not sure if just putting it in there is enough or if you need to give it a particular parameter);
- You have to do "su -" to log in as root before you can do lots of stuff like editing system files.

funcii

Just discovered (my system - RH9) in "rs.sysinit" script:
if you put "smb" as fs type in fstab it will be treated as local filesystem - will try to mount before network start, and fails.
if you put "smbfs" it will be treated as network filesystem (like NFS) - will mount after network start, and you can remove noauto.