Mount Windows or Samba shared folders from Linux

  • Access the shared folder directly from Dolphin: The user name should be prefixed with the domain name. For Windows on personal computers, the domain name is WORKGROUP by default. For company computers, it is usually the corporate name. Then the complete user name is <domain-name>\<user-name>. N.B. In URL encoding, the backslash is transcribed as %5C.

  • Mount a Windows shared folder to Linux directory tree from command line: Install the package cifs-utils. Then execute

    sudo mount -t cifs //<server-ip-address>/<folder-name> /<mount-point> -o user=<user-name>,uid=<uid>,gid=<gid>,rw

    Among the arguments for the -o option:

    • user specifies the login name for Windows;
    • uid and gid are used to set the owner of the mount point on Linux;
    • rw sets the file access rights to read and write.
  • Mount a Samba shared folder from Linux: use the same command as above.

Access Linux Samba shared folders from Windows

Even though a Linux user account can be used as a Samba account, we need to set a new password for it using the pdbedit command.

pdbedit -a -u <user-name>

Save files from iOS to Linux Samba shared folders

Using the “File” application on iOS, we can connect to a Linux samba server. However, with a default Samba server configuration, we cannot successfully save files from iOS to shared folders.

Solution (reference): add the following line to the global option of Samba, i.e. in the file /etc/samba/smb.conf:

vfs objects = acl_xattr catia fruit streams_xattr

After adding the option, restart Samba:

sudo smbcontrol smbd reload-config