Mount samba filesystem into RHEL 5.5

Question

I have a trial RHEL version for a proof of concept where I was asked to mount a windows filesystem into linux.

I tried

mount -t smbfs -o username=samba,password=samba //Desktop/Public /mnt/public

But it gives me:

mount: unknown filesystem type 'smbfs'

I get to know I need samba-client to do this.

Question. After executing

rpm -qa 'samba*'

This is what I get:

samba-common-3.0.33-3.28.el5:
samba-client-3.0.33-3.28.el5dir

Does it mean I have samba-client already? If so, what do I need to to to mount the windows share?

Someone suggested me to try: yum -install samba-client but since this is a trial version, I'm not subscribed to RHN and can't get the update. How else can I install the client?

Final question, if I can't do this, am I able to still mount for instance other RHEL? ( how is that called? regular mount or somthing? )

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You do not need samba-client for that. What you need is the smbfs or cifs kernel module. smbfs is deprecated and should not be used (unless you can't use cifs for some reason. e.g. your distribution is too old or perhaps you're trying to connect to a Win95 box or something.)

Try:

# lsmod | grep cifs
# modprobe cifs
# lsmod | grep cifs
cifs                  279398  0 
# grep cifs /proc/filesystems
nodev   cifs

Then try with mount -t cifs ... as mentioned by Gilles.

If that doesn't work, you can access the files using smbclient (e.g.) instead of mounting the filesystem. smbclient is in the samba-client and gives you an interface similar to a command line FTP client.

To "mount [...] other RHEL", there are various options. You could use NFS (in which case you would have to set up an NFS server on the machine you want to mount.) Another possibility is sshfs, in which case all you need on the server is an SSH server, but the client will need sshfs, which needs fuse. I don't know if RHEL 5.5 supports fuse. It would also be possible to set up Samba on the other RHEL box and then mount using mount -t cifs ... as if it were a Windows box.