Sunday, April 28, 2013

Mount CIFS directory in Ubuntu (Linux) for Duke University OIT

Tired of switching to your Windows, just to edit your webpages? Just because the OIT supports mounting those CIFS drives only on Win / MAC.

I used the following technique to mount the CIFS directory on my Ubuntu.

First, you  need to be on the Duke network. If not, get onto the VPN.

Then,
mkdir ~/mnt
sudo mount -t cifs //myserver_ip_address/folder ~/mnt -o username=netid,noexec

where
my_server_ip_address = homedir.oit.duke.edu
folder =  users/x/netid  (where x is the first letter of your netid. For e.g. if your netid is john, then folder  = users/j/john)

And thats it. You can see your CIFS directory mounted in ~/mnt.

For editing the files in the public_html, I usually do "sudo gedit ~/mnt/public_html/index.html", since the directory is mounted as a read-only directory.