Running into cryptic errors really sucks, and this was certainly no exception. We had a Windows share provided to us that we wanted to mount to an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server for general storage.

After reading the Ubuntu MountWindowsSharesPermanently wiki page and consulting the smbmount man page I came up with this new (initial) /etc/fstab entry:

//192.168.1.5/test-smb1 /mnt/it_hosted cifs credentials=/root/it_hosted_windows_share_mount.conf,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm2 0 0

The /root/it_hosted_windows_share_mount.conf file contained:

username=storageuser
password=SuperSecret
domain=example

I’ve substituted values of course. One thing to note is that if example.com were the real domain, I’ve made sure to use example as the value.

Then came the mount error (13): Permission denied error. I tried from a Windows box and was able to connect fine, so I knew that the server/share wasn’t the problem.

I then decided to call mount directly as shown here. After getting that working, I rechecked the syntax used in /etc/fstab and then finally looked at /root/it_hosted_windows_share_mount.conf again.

What do you know, the old & much despised EOL issue. After changing the DOS EOL to UNIX everything worked. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been bitten by that.