Samba fails to mount at boot works later

[Tom Andrews]

Binary package hint: samba

Karmic on x86_64

CIFS failing to mount at boot but once loaded works fine.

dmesg shows the following errors
[ 49.248470] CIFS: UNC Path does not begin with // or \\
[ 49.248473] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22

fstab contains:
\\192.168.2.1\Music /home/tandrews/Music cifs username=tandrews,password=xxxxxx 0 0

I read others were encountering it when they had network-manager so I removed it and set the network settings manually.
/etc/network/interfaces set:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

resolv.conf contains:
nameserver 192.168.2.1

Even with this I am still getting this error.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[Thierry Carrez (ttx)]

Could you try with "//192.168.2.1/Music" in /etc/fstab ?

[Patrick Avella (me-patrickavella)]

I'm having the same problem, and other users from the ubuntuforums.org site are sharing my experience. It looks like some type of race condition. Adding _netdev to the mount options does not help. So far it seems like there's a "slight chance" the CIFS share will mount on boot, but in most cases it does not. Running mount -a always mounts it properly.

This is the thread where it has been discussed: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1466599

Unfortunately I can't help much further than this. I just know that doing something that I've done for 10 years has suddenly stopped working in the latest distribution in a way that seems to be related to the new boot process.

Currently users are able to 'hack around the issue' by adding ifup.d and ifdown.d scripts, but it would be preferential to have normal fstab functionality back.

[Andy Kniss (akniss)]

I am having this issue as well. Quite annoying to have to mount my network shares manually after each boot. It sometimes wreaks havoc with my nightly backups, because if the computer is rebooted prior to the backup, the backup drive does not get mounted.

[Bryce (annbryce)]

I have the same issue with a network attached drive through SAMBA. I have to manually mount after starting up.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for util-linux (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[linuxgeoff (linuxgeoff)]

The bug report has Expired, but the bug still seems to exist. I, too have to manually mount my cifs drives as fstab fails to mount them at start up - I suspect that fstab is executing before network-manager has fully initiated the network

[Jim Kyle (jim-jimkyle)]

It's probably due to the new boot-up routines, which attempt to do the mounting before the network has been brought up. It's still a bug, though, since mounting of network connections should be delayed, not skipped.

The workaround is to put a "manual" mount command into the /etc/rc.local file, which won't run until after the network has been brought up.