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I think I raised this issue before, but I can't find it. I've just had to rebuild my machine, for reasons I still do not understand. Which means that I'm forced to remember all the things I have to do to make it all work. In this case, I have two devices which require to be mounted, a Drobo unit and a Transporter. In the sharing page a search brings up the two devices. Which brings up the first point. The two devices are NAMED. In this case Drobo-fs and Transporter. These are of no use, since fstab requires an IP address. This I've got round by adding an entry in /etc/hosts to that effect. The second is that a user name and a password are required to mount. Here the problem is more acute, since Control Centre sharing does not include an option for password in 'Options'. Dredging through my memory of what I did before, I edited the fstab file to append 'password=(whatever it was)' to the entry for the two devices. This, I regard as a failure. Particularly in the sense that the option to add a password used to be there, but has disappeared, never to return. Without the option to add a password, it is not written to fstab, and the mount fails.

Hmmm! Not so sorted as I imagned. On re-booting the machine, it was evident that the two devices had not been mounted on boot-upI'd fleetingly noted that on the splash screen, on bootup, there had been a reference to mounting the two devices. As root, doing a manual mount with mount -a i was prompted for the passwords and all was well. I can see nothing obvious in the fstab entry, below. But then modifying fstab is something I do seldom

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# Entry for /dev/sda6 :
UUID=d526ad62-c12c-4062-ba9c-b92b20d381ba /home ext4 relatime,acl 1 2
//drobo-fs/Public /mnt/Public cifs username=droboman password=vintage 0 0
//transporter/Transporter /mnt/Transporter cifs username=rodgos password=vintage 0 0


On a subsequent re-boot, I entered the passwords in the popup box in the splash screen, and that worked, but neither this, nor mounting manually is something I want to be doing.

Why don't you first read through your older threads where the drobo / smb issue was often a topic?

I had read through the earlier posts, but missed the appropriate one. However, the latest approach would seem to agree with the earlier, but the required result (Automatic maounting) has not been achieved. For some reason the password option in fstab is not effective.

Well, the format of the option section seems wrong, options should be specified with , and not separated via blanks.

man fstab wrote: The fourth field (fs_mntops).
This field describes the mount options associated with the
filesystem.

It is formatted as a comma-separated list of options. It
contains at least the type of mount (ro or rw), plus any
additional options appropriate to the filesystem type
(including performance-tuning options). For details, see
mount(8) or swapon(8).

Your reply jogged another memory. It also prompted me to look at the setup in an old laptop, also running Mageia and mounting the same devices. The entry here is quite different to that producedin the recent build. the option for username=xxx is replaced by 'credentials=/etc/samba/auth.drobo-fs.<username>. This is a file which contains only one line 'password=<password>. My jogged memory reminded me that this was due to some concern that the username and password in the earlier invocation of fstab were readable. Whereas the auth file is only readable for root.. Oddly looking at the sharing setup in the laptop, this is a version which has the password option in the page and writes correctly to fstab. I'll amend the fstab file in line with the laptop, and see if it works.

The changes (based on the format on the laptop) worked fine for the drobo, but the same command for the Transporter did not. The reason for this is not clear. For the moment I'll leave it like that. I get asked for the password, on bootup, so it will mount. So far, I've spent more time on sorting it out than I usually use in a month of using the Transporter.