[SOLVED] fstab changes in Hardy?

[kbailey]

In order to make my network drive (Windows share) visible to the Mediatomb GUI and to my backup software, I used following fstab entry in Gutsy and it worked flawlessly:

//201.80.10.103/Media /home/anne/KNetMedia   smbfs  auto,username=anne,password=,uid=1000,umask=000,user   0 0
//201.80.10.103/OfficeBU /home/anne/OfficeBackup   smbfs  auto,username=anne,password=5566,uid=1000,umask=000,user   0 0

Since upgrading to Hardy, these folders no longer mount on startup. After yesterday's round of updates, I can access them manually via "Connect to Server" and by browsing my network, (being unable to do that was a known bug that has since been fixed in this release) but I need them to be mounted as folders on startup in order for other software to "see" them.

Any advice on how to get this working again will be greatly appreciated.

[njparton]

Maybe an obvious question, but are the username's, passwords and uid's listed above still correct?

[kbailey]

After having messed up on that one in the past, there are no obvious questions.

Yes, the usernames, passwords and uids must be correct, as I haven't changed anything on the network drive and the move to Hardy was through an upgrade, not a fresh install.

I can still access the drives through the network icon in "places" or via "connect to server" with no user name or password being entered for the "Media" drive and the old password being entered for "OfficeBU". They just won't mount on startup the way they did before the upgrade.

Thank you very much for the suggestion.

[njparton]

I think fstab is a little different in hardy compared to gutsy as I was helping a guy with a DVD drive problem yesterday after an upgrade. Removing the DVD entry from his fstab file, the kernel still mounted the drive. I don't think that would have happened with gutsy (?).

My only suggestions would be to do a clean install or to research this issue on the wider web in relation to the current kernel used by ubuntu.

[BlueSkyNIS]

I think that the HAL is doing all the mounting now, fstab is used only for root, swap partitions (my opinion only).

EDIT: Is there any error message when you try to mount e.g "//201.80.10.103/Media" manually in terminal?

[kbailey]

Thanks again for the input, nj. A reinstall is usually my solution to everything, though I don't have time for that this week.

BlueSky, I can access the shares via the network icon in "places" and by using the "connect to server" gui. At that point, I can read and write to the drive, but other software (ie. MediaTomb) cannot use it through their guis.

I'm not certain what command to use to mount this drive via terminal and don't have much time today to research and learn. If you could provide a suggestion, I would truly appreciate it and will post my results, hopefully helping others with the same issues.

What a great community!

[BlueSkyNIS]

well, I don't have any experience with network drives in linux, but here it goes: try to manually do the mount, type

mount //201.80.10.103/Media

and if fstab has all options correct mount will do its stuff, else it will say where the error is.

Maybe, you should also add _netdev option in fstab

[wjhobbs]

I was having similar problems. My smbfs mounts worked in Gutsy but failed after upgrading to Hardy.

After a week or so of tearing out what little hair I have left and searching the forums, I discovered that I needed to install libpam-smbpass for Places > Network to see my Windows network and provide access to the shares. But I was still unable to save mail attachments etc. directly to the shares.

I still needed to have fstab do a proper mount. What worked in Gutsy was something that looks like this:

//chryxus-ca/imsig_data /home/jhobbs/chryxus_data smbfs rw,username=jhobbs,password=xxxxxxxx,uid=jhobbs,gid=imsig-mgmt 0 0

My samba shares are hosted on a Centos-based system with authentication. (Since I am the sole user on this machine I'm not worried about having the credentials visible. But I'll fix that soon.)

Well some of my forum browsing told me that smbfs had been replaced with cifs, so tried that change. But no change in behavior. I tried a number of different option changes that seemed indicated in different forum posts. But no success.

Then I tried a manual mount as BlueSkyNIS suggested (mount //chryxus-ca/imsig_data). And an error came back to say that the gid "imsig-mgmt" was not valid! But I knew it was valid for my samba server machine because this had worked under Gutsy.

But then it occurred to me that the new functionality in libpam-smbpass might be passing a different set of credentials from Hardy to my samba server. So I added a group "imsig-mgmt" to my Hardy box and added my user id to the group and tried the manual mount again.

It worked!!

Thanks to BlueSkyNIS for showing how to get the diagnostic message that pointed me in the right direction.

I have changed the fstab entries to use cifs instead of smbfs -- but everything else is the same. Adding a matching group to the Hardy machine was all that was needed.

Hope this helps someone.

[BlueSkyNIS]

Well I am glad you solved the problem


Cheers

[TonyS]

Hi wjhobbs,

Could you detail exactly what you mean by "adding a matching group"?

Thanks!

Tony