Mounting VUSpace with Samba and Linux

Vanderbilt IT nicely provides a menu of instructions for mounting your VUSpace with Windows and MacOS, but doesn't mention how to do it with Linux or Unix... even though, if you poke at it a bit, you may realize that VUSpace is served from Linux servers running Samba!

It's very easy; follow these steps:

Activate your VUSpace

...if you haven't already. If you haven't, I'm surprised you care enough to even be reading this. If you're a student, it's activated automatically. If you're faculty or staff, you can activate it here.

Make sure you have the Samba clients installed

These come with all major distributions. As of early April, 2003, there have been a few recent security vulnerabilities in Samba, so make sure you've got an up-to-date and patched version.

Get the lmhosts file

VU ITS used to provide one, but I'm not sure where it is any more. However, here is one that works as of 2005-August-09. Stick it in your Samba configuration directory (which is /etc/samba on Debian).

Make a mountpoint

As usual when mounting filesystems on Linux, you need somewhere to mount it. I use /tmp/knopra, but you can use anything.

Mount that puppy

Issue the command:

smbmount //vuspace-k/user /tmp/knopra -o username=knopra

Substitute your VUNet ID for "knopra" above, and substitute the first letter of it for the k in vuspace-k above. If you want to use a different mount point, replace /tmp/knopra with that. You will be prompted for your VUNet password. When that's done, your VUSpace should be availble at the mountpoint you specified.

When done

Unmount the filesystem with "smbumount /tmp/knopra" (substituting the mountpoint you actually used)