Cifs issues resolved

Please note, I’ve migrated all my posts, including this one, to a new location.

I recently bought a freecom network drive. It’s was cheap, i.e. the cheapest, but promised support for both kind of computers – Win and Mac. What could go wrong? Of course I soon ran into problems trying to mount it in Ubuntu. Both mounting directly from command line or adding an entry to fstab would give me the error:

mount error 20 = Not a directory
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)

After plenty of googling, I found a hack on the linux-cifs-client mailing list:

echo 0 > /proc/fs/cifs/LinuxExtensionsEnabled

I was then able to mount without a problem. Clearly my tinpot device only supported the basic smbfs protocol. While this worked, it wasn’t going to survive a reboot so I dug into mount.cifs (8). I found plenty of options for turning off various aspects of the extensions but nothing that disabled them all.

So I went back to google and happily came across this thread, on the same list, discussing adding a new “nounix” option to mount.cifs. It was dated from July last year. Despite it not being in the man page, I gave it a shot. It worked first time.

//diskfrog/music /media/Music cifs guest,nounix 0 0

After a reboot, the share mounted automatically, which was just what I was looking for.

This experience nicely encapsulates what’s great about open source. Faced with a problem with a piece of software, not only did I find a solution, I was able to read about the genesis of a new feature that scratched, not only the developer’s itch, but my itch too. I suppose I should really look into patching manpages and put back.