Reminder to myself: How to use fstab

This is a short reminder to myself about common mounting use-cases during boot time using fstab.

Overview

  1. General
  2. Mount ext partitions (unix standart)
  3. Mount ntfs partitions (windows standart)
  4. Mount samba folders

General

In order to mount folder during boot, edit fstab via: sudo nano /etc/fstab
Identify partitions via UUID no by name (e.g. not by /sda/sda1).
Check partition names and their UUIDs via
lsblk and ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
Test fstab settings with sudo mount -a.

Mount ext partitions

fstab example entry:

UUID=8c21afbf-23a9-47e9-b241-417823663674 /media/vm ext4 defaults 0 1

Target folders in /media/ are automatically created (do not have to exist before).If the mounted folder is read-only, use chown/chmod in order to change permission of mounted folders.
sudo chown -R myname.myname /media/data/

Mount ntfs partitions

fstab example entry:

UUID=38E75A3E7CBCAC0E /media/data ntfs-3g default,uid=1000,windows_names,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0

Target folders in /media/ are not automatically created. Create them via:
sudo mkdir /media/data followed by
sudo chown myname.myname /media/data/

Mount samba folders

In order to mount smb folders during boot, install the cifs-utils package:
sudo apt-get install cifs-utils
fstab example entry:

//192.168.1.2/SharedFolderName /media/NAS/LocalFolderName/ cifs credentials=/home/username/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,gid=1000,uid=1000,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

Target folders in /media/ are not automatically created. Create them via:
sudo mkdir /media/data followed by
sudo chown myname.myname /media/data/

Create the .smbcredentials file in your home directory:

username=myname
password=mypassword
domain=domain_or_workgroupname

Secure the ~/.smbcredentials file via:
chmod 0600 ~/.smbcredentials

In case of:

mount error(95): Operation not supported Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

add the smb protocol version in the fstab line (smb1 is default). Example for smb protocol 2 would be vers=2.0 see:

//192.168.1.2/SharedFolderName /media/NAS/LocalFolderName/ cifs credentials=/home/username/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,vers=2.0,gid=1000,uid=1000,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

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