How to permanently map a network drive
This article assumes that you are on a network that has a shared drive that you'd like to gain access to. In this example the share is a Windows share.
Terminal
Start by opening a terminal session on your Ubuntu desktop and run the following command, to create a folder in the /media directory.
sudo mkdir /media/MyNetworkShare
Next we will install cifs-utils, which allows us to interact with network shares from Windows, OSX and other Unix systems
sudo apt-get install cifs-utils
Now we can edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf file
sudo vi /etc/nsswitch.conf
In the nsswitch.conf file find the following line:
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns
...and change it to:
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins dns
Install the following so that Ubuntu can resolve Windows computer names on DHCP network
sudo apt-get install libnss-winbind winbind
Restart your Ubuntu workstation.
Now we need to create a credentials file:
vi ~/.smbcredentials
Add the following lines, using a Windows user account that you're using to access the shared network drive.
username=steven
password=MyComplicatedPassword
Now run the following command to discover your Ubuntu user account gid and uid.
id steven
Now you can edit /etc/fstab
sudo vi /etc/fstab
...and add the following line, using the ip address of your file server and your gid and uid from the earlier step.
//192.168.12.34/share /media/MyNetworkShare cifs credentials=/home/steven/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,gid=1000,uid=1000,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0
Finally you can run the following command to mount this share:
sudo mount -a
You should now see the mounted share in your Ubuntu desktop file manager.
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