Showing posts with label url. Show all posts
Showing posts with label url. Show all posts

Tuesday, 24 January 2017

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.