Saturday 28 March 2015

How To Map A Network Drive Onto Ubuntu 14.04 Permanently

Been looking for a way to backup a client windows server to Linux Rsnapshot server for a while and just found THIS article which did the trick nicely.

This simple tutorial shows you how to map a network drive, Windows share as example, onto Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with read and write permission permanently.
All things will be done in a terminal window. Not familiar with Linux command? Don’t be afraid, just paste the command into terminal and hit enter to run one by one. There will be a few pictures to make things more clear.
Preparation:
There are a few preliminary actions we need to do before we can start mounting using cifs.
1. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. Paste the command below and run to create a mount point, you can replace ‘Ji-share’ to what you want.
sudo mkdir /media/Ji-share
Create a mount point for network share
2. Install cifs-utils, which provides support for cross-platform file sharing with Microsoft Windows, OS X and other Unix systems.
Install it from Ubuntu Software Center, or via below command:
sudo apt-get install cifs-utils
3. Edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf:
sudo gedit /etc/nsswitch.conf
Find the line looks like:
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns
change it into:
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins dns
Ubuntu resolve Windows Hostname
4. Run below command so that your Ubuntu can resolve Windows computer name on a DHCP network.
sudo apt-get install libnss-winbind winbind
Reboot Ubuntu, or restart your network.
Mount (map) network drive:
Now edit the fstab file to mount network share on start up.
1. Make a backup by running the command below:
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab_old
If you need to restore your backup, run:
sudo mv /etc/fstab_old /etc/fstab
2. Create a credentials file via:
gedit ~/.smbcredentials
insert the username and password for accessing the remote share. Replace “Ji” & “741852963″ with yours and save the file.
username=Ji
password=741852963
create-credentials
3. Run command to get your gid and uid. Replace handbook with your user name.
id handbook
Get Ubuntu user id
4. Now edit the fstab by running the command:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
Add below line (one line) to the end and save it. REPLACE WORDS IN RED!
//192.168.1.5/share /media/Ji-share cifs credentials=/home/handbook/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,gid=1000,uid=1000,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0
Map Network Share in Ubuntu
Finally run sudo mount -a in terminal and you’ll get the network share mapped in Unity Launcher and Nautilus file browser:
Map network share Ubuntu 14.04

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