Mounting A Samba Share In Fedora

In my use case this was to get my Jellyfin server up and running to a point where it would actually see my network drive to be able add library folders. Now, a few important notes. The below steps works perfectly fine to just mount a network drive and have it mounting on every boot, if you just need to access the folders for file access. In my case, with jellyfin, I had to create a folder outside of the /home folder due to permissions. So, if you are planning on using this for a media server I would recommend mounting to the /media folder instead or any location that is not /home.

Let's get started by opening up the terminal. And yes, I've spent many hours trying to find a gui option for this since I hate the terminal. But, this was in the end the easiest way.

Mounting

First, we create a mount point:

mkdir /media/folder/optionalfolder

Then install utils (could already be installed but do it anyway just in case:

sudo yum install samba-client samba-common cifs-utils

Test the connection to our server. Before doing this you need to know the local IP address to your server. The easiest way in my opinion is to just connect to your router and see what's connected. Lets assume your network drive has IP 100:

smbclient -L 192.168.0.100/ -U YourUserName

# Enter password for user "YourUserName"

# Once it connects, just exit

Now mount the share the default linux way, in terminal of course 😒:

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=YourUserName //192.168.0.100/ /media/folder

# Enter password for user "YourUserName"

From here we are good to go. But if you want the drive to be persistent, we need to create a credentials file and then edit fstab:

Automount at login

Create your password in a single file on your home drive. This does not have to be done in the terminal, I used the text editor Kate for this.

In the terminal:

sudo touch ~/.smbcreds

sudo vi .smbcreds

Enter your Windows username and password in the file:

username=YourUserName
password=YourPAssword

Then set permissions for the file in terminal.

chmod 600 ~/.smbcreds

Now we add to /etc/fstab (auto-mount). again, don't have to be done in the terminal.

sudo vi /etc/fstab

Add:

//192.168.0.100/ /media/folder/optionalfolder cifs credentials=/home/user/.smbcreds,_netdev,defaults 0 0

And that's it. Your network drive will no show up as a mounted drive and you can access it just like a normal drive or partition.