How do I permanently mount a windows network share in Ubuntu?

I'm trying to figure out how to permanently mount a windows network share in Ubuntu. Can anyone help me with the required steps?

1 Answer

I spent countless hours and visited numerous webpages to what I thought would be a straight forward problem. After writing up my notes for future reference, I decided to post them here to help anyone who might have similar problems. The notes have gone thru a few revisions and for reference there are 4 sources for further reading.

This solution has been installed and working on three ubuntu VM’s that are running under Windows 10 Pro Hyper-V and Ubuntu 20.04 KVM VMM. So far the network shares popup quickly and there is no appreciable lag times when traveling up and down the directory trees.

This solution solves a similar problem in Hyper-V when using ‘passthrough hard drives’; the Ubuntu vm's have only ‘read’ permissions on the hard drives. Unfortunately, Microsoft discourages using passthrough hard drives and this caused me to look for a linux solution. The hard drives are needed since they are to be used for extensive i/o. In my experience hard drives have faster write speeds and usually last longer than ssd drives.

Installation Notes:

The steps below have the mount points in the ‘/media/‘ folder, this follows what was recommended on some source webpages. When I started to solve this problem my mount points were setup in the ‘/mnt/‘ folder, as of now I am not sure if that will still work. You could give it a try if that’s what you want.
xrdp, which enables remote desktop access to a ubuntu-pc, was used in all my installations. If you do not need this capability omit this package from the first step; everything else should still work.
All the steps listed are what I actually used.

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Source:

Source: How to change permissions on mounted windows share?

Source: Ubuntu Server 18.04.01 LTS CIFS Mount failing——————————————————————————————————————————

after new Ubuntu install, additional packages to add:

xrdp, samba-common, samba, smbclient

open ‘Terminal’ and enter the following commands:

install cifs utilities

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

create mount points for windows shares and set permissions

sudo mkdir /media/mountName

sudo chown userId:userId /media/mountName

sudo chmod 755 /media/mountName

create ‘credentials’ file to hold userid/password and set permissions

sudo nano ~/.smbcredentials

enter the following 2 lines

username=windowsLoginId
password=windowsPassword
enter 'ctrl-x', then 'y' and finally 'enter' to exit and save file

set permissions to hide username and password

sudo chmod 600 ~/.smbcredentials

retrieve ‘uid’ and ‘gid’ values for next step

the ‘id’ command will output something similar to the following:

uid=1000(userId) gid=1000(userId) groups=1000(userId),4(adm),………….,1001(smbgroup)

backup and edit ‘fstab’ to mount window share at ubuntu startup

mkdir ~/system-backups

cp /etc/fstab ~/system-backups

sudo nano /etc/fstab

at end of file enter the following line:

//winServerName/shareName /media/mountName cifs credentials=/home/userId/.smbcredentials,uid=1000,gid=1000,vers=3.0,nounix 0 0

(Note: for the last 2 ‘0’ enter a ‘tab’ before the ‘0’ and delete any carriage returns)

enter 'ctrl-x', then 'y' and finally 'enter' to exit and save file

test mounting of windows network share

sudo mount -a

if no errors appear, the mount should appear in ‘file manager’

check mount in file manager for read/write access

test permanent network share

shutdown and reboot pc

open ‘file manager’ and check network share

other relevant commands

manually mount network share

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=windowsLoginId //winServerName/shareName /media/mountName

you will be prompted for the ‘password’

prepare mount point for deletion; do not run command where ‘pwd’ is ‘/media’

sudo umount /media/mountName

delete mount point

rmdir /media/mountName