Quick guide to autofs for SMB and NFS shares on Ubuntu

If you have to work with network shares, you’re probably familiar with fstab and auto-mounting them on boot. This is great if your server is always reachable, but it becomes cumbersome if the connection is lost. In case the target server goes down or is not yet up when the machine boots, you have to mount the directory as root. This is particularly bad if your network takes a long time to get online, for example, if you have a wireless connection.

There’s a much better and robust way, which is to use autofs. With autofs, the shares will be only mounted when required and also get unmounted after some time. It handles disconnects much more gracefully. The setup is pretty simple, but there aren’t too many guides around to help you get started. Here’s a quick-start guide for Ubuntu, other Linux distributions will be similar. In this guide, I’ll be setting up autofs to connect to a Linux NFS share and to a password-protected Windows SMB share.

Preparation

You need to install autofs and cifs-utils. On Ubuntu, you can use apt-get to get these. You’ll also need a folder where you want to mount your shares, in my case, this will be /mnt/net/smb for SMB shares and /mnt/net/nfs for NFS shares.

Configuration

Every time you change something in the config, use sudo service autofs restart to restart the autofs service.

The main configuration file is /etc/auto.master. Here, we define the mapping of folders to shares. Let’s add the two directories from above:

/mnt/net/smb /etc/auto.cifs-shares
/mnt/net/nfs /etc/auto.network

This tells autofs to check auto.cifs-shares when you try to access a share in /mnt/net/smb, and similarly for nfs. The configuration files contain one share per line. The first part of the line is the directory name that will be used for the share, after that, you have to provide how the connection should be made and finally the target. Let’s take a look at auto.network and add a NFS share there. In my case, the contents are:

Shared -fstype=nfs,rw,soft,tcp,nolock homeserver:/tank/Shared

If I go into the /mnt/net/nfs/Shared directory now, it will automatically connect to the /tank/Shared NFS share from the machine called homeserver. That was easy, wasn’t it? Next up, SMB shares, in auto.cifs-shares:

home -fstype=cifs,rw,credentials=/home/anteru/.smbcredentials,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 ://homeserver/anteru

This is slightly more complicated. You don’t want to save your SMB credentials in the auto.cifs-shares file (which may be visible to every user), so I’ve stored them in /home/anteru/.smbcredentials. This is a very simple file which looks like this:

username=anteru
password=swordfish

When connecting to a SMB share, you’ll likely want to add file_mode=0777 and dir_mode=0777 so everything created there is readable and writable by default for all users. This is needed because the share is mounted as root. You can also force it to be mounted as a specific user. Remove the file_mode and dir_mode and replace it with uid=1000 (1000 is my user id). To find your user id, run:

id -u username

Finally, there’s a slightly tricky bit which is shares containing $ characters. You need to escape them in the auto.cifs-shares file using \$, otherwise, you’ll get errors.

That’s it, hope this quick guide will help you to get started with autofs!