Using CIFS to access Windows Shares

Document updated on Jan,20,2011 to reflect the fact that Redhat stop smbfs support starting in RHEL5.

Starting in RHEL5, CIFS is the supported method to mount your H drive on central file storage.

CIFS is an update to the SMB protocol. It has several improvements (unicode, access control lists, aggressive caching, ...), and the open-source implementation of which seems to have avoided the 2/4GB transfer bug that is present in SAMBA.

For Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 and above, kernel will only support cifs. The mount command will indirectly invoke /sbin/mount.cifs

Mounting the share manually

From terminal, type:

# mkdir /mnt/h-drive;
#mount -t cifs -o user=<ADUserID>,dom=ad, uid=<local unix account>,gid=<local unix groupid> //eden.ad.sandiego.edu/faculty/<ADUserID> /mnt/h-drive/

It will prompt for your AD password, after you input your password, it should not prompt you anything. Type mount and you should see your drive has been mounted.

[root@fantasy mnt]# mount |grep h-drive
//eden.ad.sandiego.edu/faculty on /mnt/h-drive type cifs (rw,mand)

The uid=<local unix account>, gid=<local unix groupid> parameters will make sure your local unix account has full read/write access to h drive.

Mounting the share permanently

All you need to do is to edit your /etc/fstab file. You should add the following line to it

//eden.ad.sandiego.edu/faculty/ /mnt/h-drive cifs uid=,credentials=,domain=ad 0 0

Substitue your own ADUserID with <ADUserID>.

For the argument <credentialfile>, you need to create a file in /etc, for example /etc/cifspw, and put the following in the file

   username=<ADUserID>

   password=<ADpassword>

Next, as root user, create a mount point in /mnt by

    mkdir /mnt/h-drive

When the machine reboots next time, /mnt/h-drive should be automatically mounted to your h drive on central file storage.