Mounting Windows share on startup without storing password in plain text

Question

I have the following in my /etc/fstab on a Red Hat 5 system:

//share/folder /mnt/folder cifs username=<my username>,password=<my password>,ro,soft,nounix

Can I replace this with something that will still mount //share/folder on my Linux box on startup without storing my plain text password in fstab?

Answer 1

You can make a separate file with the following lines, and make it readable by root only:

username=<my username>
password=<my password>

Then in /etc/fstab, replace the username and password options with:

credentials=/path/to/your/file