Monday, December 3, 2012

Mount a Samba file share from esx 3.5


This is an extract from a William Lam’s post in vmware communities:
If you want to mount NTFS volume through the ESX Service console (verified on 3.0.2 & 3.5) you'll need to run the following command:
mount -t smbfs -o username='DOMAIN\primp' //IP_ADDRESS/SHARE_PATH /some/mount/path
username MUST has the single tick marks around the DOMAIN\username
Example: DOMAIN=vmware.com, USERNAME=user, IP=172.30.0.100, CIFS_PATH=/admin_files, LOCAL_MOUNT_PATH=/tmp/mount
You would do the following:
mount -t smbfs -o username='vmware.com/user' //172.30.0.100/admin_files /tmp/mount
This will then prompt for your password, and you should be able to mount. If you want to always mount this on boot, you'll need to add an /etc/fstab entry, this will require your password, but you can mask that off by specifying a file that is only readable to root or some user where your password can be saved without being in plain sight. You'll also want to make sure you open the port for samba through the firewall (esxcfg-firewall -e smbClient)