Mounting network shares on Linux

Published 2020-12-04

I have a Synology NAS at home, which acts as a file share that my server writes to. I ran into some problems using the default network share functionality in GNOME's Nautilus, namely unable to delete files or folders. I suspect this is because of the file permissions, as the files are written by a app running inside Docker container (which I guess would be running as root inside the container).

The good news is mounting the network share via cif-utils and fstab worked seamlessly.

Setting it up

Create a directory under /media for the mount point of the network share, I called mine nas, so I did sudo mkdir /media/nas.
Create a credentials file in your home folder, I create mine at ~/.smb which should contain the following:

# ~/.smb
user=<NETWORK_SHARE_USERNAME>
password=<NETWORK_SHARE_PASSWORD>

Add an entry to your fstab file at /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab

//<IP_OR_DOMAIN_OF_SHARE>/<SHARE_NAME>  /media/nas  cifs    uid=1000,gid=1000,credentials=/home/<USER>/.smb     0   0

Apply the changes by running sudo mount -a

The mount should now appear and you should have access to your files.