I have two machines running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The first is a home server which is used for network attached storage using SMB. The second is a desktop, for which I want to create a permanent mount to the network attached storage.

I can connect to the network share using the Ubuntu GUI (below):

The problem with this approach is that some applications fail to write to the storage when it's mounted that way. Apparently I need to create a permanent mount point so that it's always mounted and authenticated.

I've been following this tutorial about how to do it
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently

Steps Taken

Install cifs and setup mount point...

sudo apt install cifs-utils

sudo mkdir /media/storage

Create credentials file ~/.smbcredentials...

gedit ~/.smbcredentials

Contents...

username=MY_SERVER_USERNAME

password=MY_SERVER_PASSWORD

domain=SERVER

Permissions...

chmod 600 ~/.smbcredentials

Note: I actually never know what domain refers to, do I just use "SERVER", which is the name of the machine, and that seems to work, but I haven't got the foggiest idea whether or not that's right.

Create entry in /etc/fstab...

//SERVER/storage /media/storage cifs credentials=/home/user/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm 0 0 

At this point, I have my credentials set up, I have an entry in fstab, and Ubuntu recognises the share, but when I try to access it, I get this:

mount:cifs Permission Denied

No useful reason why I can't get access.

What I've Tried

Apparently SMB doesn't support sec=ntlm anymore? So changing the entry in /etc/fstab/ to this almost works:

//SERVER/storage /media/storage cifs credentials=/home/user/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,nofail 0 0 

Now I can access the share, but I only have read access.

Questions

• How do I set up my permanent mount to the network share so that I have full read/write access?


• If sec=ntlm no longer works, how do I find out what sec= should be?


• What should the domain entry in my credentials file be?