Mounting CIFS shares under Linux

Home directories on, koko.rutgers.edu, our NetApp, are only exported to machines we administer. This is because if we export them to a machine administered by someone else, that admin could create an account with your UID (essentially you on that machine) and access your files with your permissions.

But if you administer your own Linux machine, it is possible to use CIFS to mount your home directory. If you are a grad student and your username is "joe," you can issue the following command to mount your grad home directory on /mnt:

    mount -t cifs //koko.rutgers.edu/grad/users/joe /mnt -o users=joe

You will have to provide your LCSR Windows domain password to complete the mount process. And you will need the samba-client package installed for this to work.

Though all your files will appear to have the permissions of "-rwxrwSrwx", you will gain no extra permissions over your files. It is the underlying permissions which will be applied. [Note: Everyone on the machine where this mount is done will have your access to these files. It would therefore be wise, if you're working on a machine with other potential users, to mount the files under a directory others cannot read.]

This procedure has been tested under Fedora 10, but should work similarly under other operating systems.

This page last updated March 2, 2010.