Recently unable to mount Windows 2012 Server network drives

[linuxnoob87]

@wmcl

That date fits (roughly) the same time frame as when my network shares stopped mounting as well.

[wmcl]

I just restored my machine to the state it was in when the mount points were still working, but they didn't. Starting to suspect the Windows server as the source of the problem.

Edit:

The Windows Server(s) in question didn't have any related updates in the time frame, also, accessing the shares with smbclient instead of mounting them does work. The windows server(s) report a failed login when attempting to mount the shares.

[darkod]

How about creating new user on windows end and assign it permissions for the share, then try with these new credentials?

Although the failed login might relate to actually how the two machines talk between themselves rather than the credentials being wrong. In such case even new user wouldn't work.

[wmcl]

Managed to get my mount points working again after poking around a bit in the mount options.

Setting

sec=krb5

gave me a different error ("no such file or directory"), more research showed that this was caused by the package keyutils not being installed, fixed that by installing it.

sudo apt -y install keyutils

Then, after initializing Kerberos for the user I am mounting the shares as

sudo kinit username

the shares would mount again.

[linuxnoob87]

@Wmcl

I follow you up to a point. I installed keyutils but then I'm not sure what you did after that.

Trying to get the shares to mount at boot via fstab

Edit: If I run

sudo kinit username

I get the error

sudo: kinit: command not found

[wmcl]

kinit is in the krb5-user package.

Unfortunately I've hit some more snags by now, the mount points got disconnected after some time, but I could remount them just fine after running the kinit command again. I'll need to figure out how to make the Kerberos authentication persistent.

[linuxnoob87]

Darko:

Tried this and ran into the same issue.

[darkod]

I have no more ideas right now. You will have to search deeper into the logs and google the error messages you find there. If a mount is rejected there must be log entries on either side.

I have to say this is strange situation because in most cases users would insist on using Windows on workstation because of the GUI comfort but run linux on their server (which allows to save a lot on windows server license too). But in this case the server runs Windows and has CIFS shares in the network which are not as native to linux as NFS. And with Microsoft doing quite a lot of changes on their end too (sometimes patching vulnerabilities that have existed for decades) you would need a deeper investigation to find the issue.

Another thing not mentioned here is whether domain is used on Windows or not. I assume not but that would change things. I don't really see why kerberos would complain if there is no domain in place. But on the other hand, like I said, I have mostly used linux servers and windows clients, not the other way around.

[linuxnoob87]

Darko,

It's a windows server on a windows domain but not joined to the domain (as it's always been).

This linux server was (and still is) my initial deployment of any sort of linux server; the reason for this is that I've been a windows sysadmin for many years and am more comfortable with windows.

Can you (please) point in the direction (on the linux side) as to what logs I need to look at? Is there another share type I can use on the windows server that interfaces better with linux?

[darkod]

Try the following and post the output here:

sudo mount -t cifs -vvv //HServer/HPics /mnt/HPhotos -o user=(Username),password=(Password),sec=ntlm

PS. Also check the last lines in /var/log/syslog for errors related to the cifs mount.