mount samba shares

I just found out that  'mount -t smbfs' no longer works with Fedora. Turns out that it has been deprecated for a long long time. If you try it you will get nothing more than an error.

mount: unknown filesystem type 'smbfs'

I read in a few places that you could use 'mount -t cifs' instead. Didn't see why that should work but tried it anyway and as expected it didn't work.

retrying with upper case share name mount error 6 = No such device or address Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)

Fortunately there is more than one way to skin a cat and fuse is what I turned to. Gone are the days when you had to rely on kernel support to mount different file system types. Nowadays with fuse, you can mount all kinds of things with userland tools. So I checked the fuse listings to see what's on offer. There are three packages that provide SMB support. As a geek , I am supposed to be lazy, so I picked the one that can be installed with YUM; which is fusesmb. Laziness doesn't always pay. You need to create a ~/.smb/fusesmb.conf file before you can start using it and you need to read the man pages before you can figure out what goes into it (yeah RTFM, obviously). And then you need to change the permissions on that file to 600 or fusesmb refuses to run. Unfortunately creating the fusesmb.conf file and changing the permissions made no difference because fusesmb still refuses to run. It produces the following error and a sense of deja vu:

fuse: failed to open /dev/fuse: Permission denied

I can still mount a folder as root, but the folder it mounted wasn't the folder that expected to be mounted, it was a shared folder that was empty. Unlike other fuse packages you cannot type in the path to the server at the command line. For example in SSHFS I can type the following command

sshfs [email protected]:/home/raditha/ /mnt/radmedia/

And fuse will mount exactly the folder that I tell it to. Getting back to the error, you can over come that by doing a chmod (as root)

chmod o+rw /dev/fuse

Then you will get another error about permission to execute fusermount. You can solve that by adding yourself to the fuse group. You will need to logout and login again though for the change to take effect. Of course in X, just closing the terminal and opening a new one is usually enough. Now to figure out how to make this thing (fusesmb) mount the folder that I want it to mount instead of what it wants to mount