Accessing SMB network drives on Linux (Ubuntu)

Last year my university's file servers failed and luckily they kept a backup of my home drive. When they finally restored the backups, they sent me some cryptic instructions along the lines of:

Your Informatics Home was not affected by the data loss and is available under: smb:\\india.inf.kcl.ac.uk\k1234567\

So I googled around about how to access this. I recognized the 'smb' protocol to be a SAMBA protocol and tried to find a way to connect to the drive, but I found nothing useful. Even searching for SMB connection with Linux or how to install samba on Linux gave me nothing.

It's only until I realized I needed to search "how to mount network drive in Linux" that I found the correct solution as described on this page: http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2014/08/map-network-drive-onto-ubuntu-14-04/.

You can follow the instructions on that page verbatim. In the case of samba shares, the only difference is I removed the 'smb:' part and replaced the back slashes (\\, \) with forward slashes. So the final line in the /etc/fstab file was:

//india.inf.kcl.ac.uk/k1234567 /media/k1234567 cifs credentials=/home/k1234567/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,gid=100,uid=1000,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

I hope this helps out anyone who is wondering what to do with smb urls.