172

I have access to a cifs network drive. When I mount it under my OSX machine, I can read and write from and to it.

When I mount the drive in ubuntu, using:

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=${USER},password=${PASSWORD} //server-address/folder /mount/path/on/ubuntu

I am not able to write to the network drive, but I can read from it. I have checked the permissions and owner of the mount folder, they look like:

4.0K drwxr-xr-x  4 root root    0 Nov 12  2010 Mounted_folder

I cannot change the owner, because I get the error:

chown: changing ownership of `/Volumes/Mounted_folder': Not a directory

When I descend deeper into the network drive, and change the ownership there, I get the error that I have no permission to change the folder´s owner.

What should I do to activate my write permission?

Improve this question
0

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
278

You are mounting the CIFS share as root (because you used sudo), so you cannot write as normal user. If your Linux Distribution and its kernel are recent enough that you could mount the network share as a normal user (but under a folder that the user own), you will have the proper credentials to write file (e.g. mount the shared folder somewhere under your home directory, like for instance $HOME/netshare/. Obviously, you would need to create the folder before mounting it).

An alternative is to specify the user and group ID that the mounted network share should used, this would allow that particular user and potentially group to write to the share. Add the following options to your mount: uid=<user>,gid=<group> and replace <user> and <group> respectively by your own user and default group, which you can find automatically with the id command.

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=${USER},password=${PASSWORD},uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g) //server-address/folder /mount/path/on/ubuntu

If the server is sending ownership information, you may need to add the forceuid and forcegid options.

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=${USER},password=${PASSWORD},uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g),forceuid,forcegid, //server-address/folder /mount/path/on/ubuntu
Improve this answer
16
  • 3
    it worked for me! But we should add that if the shared folder is in a PC with a login domain you should add the option domain. Something like this: sudo mount -t cifs -o username=${USER},password=${PASSWORD},dom=${DOMAIN}, uid=<user>,gid=<group> //server-address/folder /mount/path/on/ubuntu In fact the domain can go in the "username" option, but remember that you have to use / instead of `, like username=DOMAIN/user.name`.
    – João Portela
    Commented Dec 19, 2014 at 9:17
  • Yes, that's correct. :-) One might need to specify the domain or workgroup (for older Windows version) via the "domain=" option or via the username, that's a good point. And sometimes it is even necessary to specify the encryption scheme or the CIFS version to be used. But all this was not part of this question, so I left it aside. :-)
    – Huygens
    Commented Dec 20, 2014 at 16:08
  • 4
    This is just what I needed. I had an entry in /etc/fstab to auto mount the network drive on startup. I could not write to the mount so I added ,uid=<myUserID> for a line that looks like this: //192.168.1.7/public /colmustang cifs username=<uname>,password=<upassword>,uid=<myUserID> 0 0
    – James
    Commented May 22, 2015 at 1:34
  • 9
    @71GA username is the remote login to use for authentication. The uid is the local user ID you want to nap all files/folders. So the username is decoupled from the uid, the username is the remote user login while the uid is your local user id. Note that it could be the same thing if your server is Samba and you use an LDAP or other centralized account on both client and server :-).
    – Huygens
    Commented Jan 12, 2016 at 12:51
  • 1
    @Tak Good question. See the edited answer.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Jul 23, 2018 at 16:18
38

I tested the following command successfully:

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=[username],password=[password],uid=1001,gid=1001 //172.16.148.2/dfsgob01 /home/ususario/Documentos/benz-win
Improve this answer
3
  • 36
    Use "id -u <user>" and "id -g <user> to get the uid and gid respectively.
    – nvd
    Commented Sep 16, 2014 at 10:00
  • 8
    Note that you can use the user name directly as documented in man mount.cifs
    – jstricker
    Commented Apr 24, 2017 at 17:57
  • 5
    To avoid writing the password alongside the command just omit the password option during the call - a prompt will then ask for it so it can be typed in invisibly.
    – conceptdeluxe
    Commented Jun 16, 2017 at 14:17
5

One way to solve this (if you can accept the security risks) is to use CIFS's noperm option to allow all users to read and write to the CIFS mount.

I haven't tested this command, but I believe this would work:

sudo mount \
  -t cifs \
  -o noperm \
  //server-address/folder \
  /mount/path/on/ubuntu

(you can also add this option via the fstab file)

Improve this answer
0

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .