Yellow Dog (fc5 derivative?) does not have smbmount or smbfs in any usable way, it seems. Instead, everyone keeps pointing at using CIFS.

While nautilus is able to mount the share in its own way, that share is not visible to any application that does not somehow integrate with nautilus itself (or so my understanding of it is). In short, I see the share but it's not mounted to any place in the file system and apps like VLC can't see it.

To remedy the problem, I want to mount the share to /mnt/share, a folder I've created. The share itself is on a FreeNas server that claims it uses CIFS.

I mount it as root using:
mount -t cifs //share/location /mnt/share -o username=user,password=pass

The share mounts but it comes out cooky. I can go in via cd command and see the file structure, permissions, etc. Nautilus can also see the file structure and different files, but it thinks all the files it sees are plain text. When I try to open the file, no matter what application I choose, it opens as though it really is text. A JPG file I know works does not open with GIMP because gimp can't read it, for example.

Even with root privileges, it will not let me copy files off the share, although I can delete, name, rename, and create files no problem. The permissions do not seem to be the problem, I'm guessing. If it was permissions, at least the files would know that an AVI is not a text file and should not be opened as such.

Any ideas?

(Edited)

If you're using FreeNAS, you're better off just using NFS for Unix machines; it's faster, more reliable, and integrates better--you probably won't see those problems. However, NFS requires more work to set up; see http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/. Also, make sure UIDs are the same across all machines that access this share or else you're in for some serious security trouble.

The hack to make it all work turned out as follows:

1. Forget mounting... It's a pain in the ass and was doomed to fail.
2. Install nautilus-actions and configure them to allow for vlc %u (or any other application). The %u apparently forced opening with a given file, including the correct location via smb://share/location.
3. For file associations, same procedure but with file -> open with other file. Include the %u as part of the call.

As for what caused all this, I will never know. Sadly all this is being done on a PS3, and while I have time to wait for things to compile, the PS3 gets too hot leave it on for too long.

So in case anyone ever needs to know!