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Network Share Automount on Boot

This guide shows you how to setup network share to auto mount during boot.

Verify Connection

Check if your network share is accessible from the target system where you are setting up this fstab entry

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=user //server_name/share_name /mnt/networkshare/

Backup /etc/fstab

Backup fstab file to your home directory. Use .bak extension for backups.

cp /etc/fstab ~/system_backups

Save all your original backups files under ~/system_backups

Create Mount Folder

Now create a directory to where the Network share should be mounted

In Linux /mnt or /media are used to mount external drives

mkdir /mnt/networkshare

networkshare van be replaced with any name you like. Use an appropriate name to understand what files are available in the share

Install additional required packages

Install cifs-utils package to be able to mount the share drive to linux systems

sudo apt install cifs-utils -y

Add fstab Entry

Linux mounts all the drives to the mount points during system boot.

//server_name/share_name /mnt/networkshare cifs username=user,password=userpassword vers=2.0 0 0

Update values to your server specific share

  • server_name
  • share_name
  • networkshare
  • user
  • userpassword

Now save and exit the fstab file.

Mounting the network share

Now that the fstab entry has been added to mount the network drive. These drives wont mount automatically until you reboot the system. You may have to mount the drives manually for this time.

Manual Mounting

To mount the drives manually, you need to reload the systemd as it still uses the old version of the fstab.

To update systemd to use the latest version reload the system with the below command.

systemctl daemon-reload

Now run mount to attach all the drives that are available in /etc/fstab

mount -a