How-to: Mount a Network drive in Ubuntu

Recently, one of my roommates bought an external network drive, so everyone in the house can upload their music and movies. It’s hooked right into the network through the router so it’s easy for anyone to access– pretty cool stuff. It was pretty simple to setup in Windows, but it took a little bit of research for Ubuntu. Specifically, we have Maxtor “Shared Storage II” hard-drive, and I wanted it to auto-mount each time I reboot my computer. I figured it out using the tutorial here, but the basics are below.

1. First you will need to install the “smbfs” package. This is what we will use to mount the drive.
   

   sudo aptitude install smbfs

2. We will also need a folder to mount the drive in. I used /media/public.
   

   sudo mkdir /media/public

3. Then, we need to edit /etc/fstab. This is where we add all the information needed to find and mount the drive. Open /etc/fstab using the command:
   

   gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

   At the end of the file add the following lines:
   

   # Mount our network drive
   //SERVER/SHARE /MOUNT-POINT smbfs guest 0 0

   Where “SERVER” is the name of your drive on the network. This can be either a name or IP address. For example, mine was “MAXTOR”. Replace “SHARE” with the folder in the drive you’d like to mount– mine was “Public”. “MOUNT-POINT” is the directory we created earlier, such as “/media/public”. The rest of the parameters have to do with permissions, and also where you can add advanced options. For more information on the advanced preferences, see
   

   man mount.smbfs

4. The final step is to tell the system to reload /etc/fstab and mount our drive. Do this with the command:
   

   sudo mount -a

   Then, you’re done! At this point you should be able to see the files in your drive with the command
   

   ls /MOUNT-POINT