The Tomes Of Experience

I’ve been battling this one for a long time….Finally got it solved…..(sort of)……

Last year, I bought a cheap $70 NAS external drive case to use as network storage…The poor man’s SAN, if you will.

Since I bought it, however, i have been unable to mount the drive under the linux console so that i can access it’s contents in bash script. Accessing the drive from Gnome file browser, works fine, however.

I tried and exhausted all options:

1. Using smbmount (although deprecated) would mount the drive, but the contents of any subsequent directory listing would be garbled and look like corrupt text
   

   ———- 1 root 16 114P 1940-10-24 12:26 ?
   ———- 1 root 16 114P 1940-10-24 12:26 ?~?????
   ———- 1 686040 32 115P 1940-10-24 12:26 9.jpgj
   ———- 1 root 16 114P 1940-10-24 12:26 and star cityg

2. Using mount.cifs would not even get that far - it would just mount error out with:
   

   mount error 20 = Not a directory

And then i stumbled across a newsgroup post which had the answer:

modprobe cifs
echo 0 > /proc/fs/cifs/LinuxExtensionsEnabled
mount /mountPoint

According to this link apparently the NAS drive doesn’t support the smb extensions supported by my client’s kernel, so disabling them allows me to mount the drive successfully…

i don’t know what the Linux extensions actually are, but i’m guessing that they have something to do with codepages and the interpretation of content, because now when i try and browse the mounted directory under Gnome’s file browser, it comes out all garbled…no problem….i can still browse the network share directly through gnome so no need to browse the share….

Just another day in front my computer…..

EDIT:
On the upside, i’m now able to mount the network drive on my linux server, and share the network mount using samba on the server. This is a long and nasty workaround to the problem that Vista can’t access the NAS server without patching the NAS device itself.

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Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 4:53 pm.
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