But following some of the things in them I was still not able to get this working. I can easily get to the share by going to Home -> Other Locations and typing in my smb info. However this computer will be used by non-tech people who just need to be able to boot the PC and have the folder already there on the desktop and be able to click on it to open.
So far I havent been able to figure out how to make this SMB mount stick. I come from Windows and have only dabbled in Linux from time to time. I finally got fed up with Windows 11 when setting up a new laptop and wanted to give Linux a try again. I am pretty well versed in Windows side of things, but know next to nothing when it comes to Linux. I like the interface on Zorin and it can seemingly do everything ill need this too easily, except for this auto mount issue.
So far I was able to get the cifs utilities installed, and figure out how to "chmod" the fstab so I could edit it. But the lines some of the other threads have to copy dont seem to be working. Right now the final line of the file says this:
Been trying variations of that line based on things in those threads I linked above and so far none of them have worked. Is there anyone who knows what I am supposed to type in the fstab file for ZorinOS 17.2 to get this working?
I suspect the issue may like in the 2nd part, the "mnt/samba" area. I have seen this changed in just about every thread and guide so I suspect I am not mounting it in the correct location to make it show up like I want, but I dont know what the correct location would be.
Please be very careful when doing this to system files. Make sure to revert the permissions back to what they were before. Even better, use one of these methods for editing files as root:
You might also want to consider making a copy of sensitive files before editing them, as backup in case things go wrong.
Is this the actual name of the shared folder on the remote host? I'm not actually sure if it'll work with spaces and/or encoded characters. Please check that and use the correct name for the host, or replace any spaces with \040, for example:
I tried the \040 instead of %20 and it did not work. I originally used the %20 as when I hover over the SMB link in the Zorin user interface it showed me the space used a %20 already so I figured that was the correct formatting here.
Thanks for the warning about the system file permissions. Ill be sure and set them back once I am done figuring this SMB auto mount thing out.
The folder name is "oa production", on the machine at 192.168.0.101. I suppose I can always rename it oa_production if you think that might make things easier as far as figuring this out without dealing with the space in the name.
Is "/mnt/samba" the standard place that network shares are typically mounted, and where things mount when you type the SMB://.... in the "Connect To Server" field at the bottom of "other places" section of the files app?
I notice that there is a folder at that location, but nothing is inside it even when I have the SMB share manually connected. But I also found the same folder area at the other places I have been trying as mount points, such as in "/Home/Production1/Samba" that was mentioned in one of those other forum threads I had been following along with. So I think the fstab line is creating those folders even though nothing is going inside them. Browsing around all the directories Im not really finding the smb connected folder anywhere on the ZorinOS machine, almost like it isnt really mounting it anywhere at all but just making a network connection to the folder when I manually connect it. I would assume that when an SMB gets mounted/mapped/whatever that I should be able to navigate to it and when clicked on see all the network attached files inside like you can on Windows. So the fact I cant find that folder makes it seem like SMB is working much differently on Linux.
But otherwise, if this is something you can do, please do try. Spaces have a way to cause a lot of unexpected little issues like this when used for file and directory names.
Yes, the /mnt directory is typically use as a mount point for things like that. But there's no hard rule about this, you can specify whatever location suits your needs best.
As for the location of the files mounted, what's happening is that the file manager has its own library implementation for accessing network shares so there are no mount points created anywhere in the filesystem physically, they are just made available in memory.
On the other hand, if you were to use the /etc/fstab as you were trying to do, this is an operation at the kernel level which you would be able to find (assuming the mount succeeds).