Automounting a CIFS share in Ubuntu

autofs is a tool that mounts and unmounts devices on demand. To use autofs to mount CIFS shares (Windows/Samba) in Ubuntu do the following:

$ sudo apt-get install autofs smbfs smbclient

Then edit /etc/auto.master and uncomment the smb line:

#
# $Id: auto.master,v 1.4 2005/01/04 14:36:54 raven Exp $
#
# Sample auto.master file
# This is an automounter map and it has the following format
# key [ -mount-options-separated-by-comma ] location
# For details of the format look at autofs(5).
#/misc  /etc/auto.misc --timeout=60
/smb    /etc/auto.smb
#/misc  /etc/auto.misc
#/net   /etc/auto.net

Restart autofs:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/autofs restart

You can now view and mount CIFS shares by changing to the directory /smb/HOSTNAME/SHARENAME e.g. to mount and change directory to "photos" on "bart":

$ cd /smb/bart/photos

You can even list the shares on "bart" by doing:

$ ls /smb/bart/

What the default scripts don't provide is the ability to have per-connection mount options. In particular I wanted to mount some hosts read only and using UTF-8. I modified the /etc/auto.smb script as follows:

...

# This file must be executable to work! chmod 755!

key="$1"
mountopts="-fstype=cifs"
smbopts=""
credfile="/etc/auto.smb.$key"
optsfile="/etc/auto.smb.$key.opts"

if [ -e $optsfile ]; then
        . $optsfile
fi

...

I then created a connection specific file /etc/auto.smb.bart.opts containing:

mountopts="$mountopts,ro,iocharset=utf8"

Now any mounts on "bart" will be set read only and use the UTF-8 character set.