by rodgoslin » Dec 9th, '17, 17:58
Doktor,
This is no 'cornercase scenario' , if I take the meaning correctly. This is an essential part of MMC, and is therefore a default application, and to my mind to have the option of mounting SMB shares (cifs), without an essential file set is not correct.
To your point of manual install, I have to confess that I do manual installs, at times. This is not by choice, but as a consequence of shortcomings in the 'official' way of doing things. Whenever Mageia issues a new version, I ALWAYS use the correct method, first, in the hope that in the new version any extant problems will have been dealt with. Only when it proves that the problem still exists, do I go for the manual method. Which has worked before.
In the present case, the 'official' way did not work, as I have outlined below
1. The first step is to locate such devices as are suitable, with the 'find servers' button. This should, and has, in the past located all of the relevant devices. Not all the time, mind, and it usually takes several tries before they all come up. In my case they consist of two Drobo units and a Transporter. The search revealed only the Transporter, and no matter how often I initiated a search, it did not find the other two. Which is why that was the one which I pursued, for moment ignoring the others.
2. The next step is to setup the mount. This is simple enough, until we come to the 'Options'. To use the devices, should the mount be successful requires that the device username and password be entered. However, since Mga 5, the option for including the password has gone. Although, from memory, it was still available on the 32 bit version, but absent from the 64 bit. The password can be entered 'manually', but, at that time the system was changed to hide the password from the user. Rather pointless if the user had to know the password to effect the mounting.
3. The final step was to establish the mount. here the system has always failed, if one takes the 'official' route. The reason is not difficult to understand, although difficult to establish why, since no reason for the failure to mount is given. The reason is because in the install the device is referred to by name, and the mount cannot mount an object unless the name is associated with an IP address. So far I have failed to find any operation which will automatically associate a named object with it's IPaddress. So a 'manual' editting of the /etc/hosts file is needed to make the system work.
4. Since all efforts to mount the drive using the 'correct' method fail, there seems little point to clicking on the 'done' button, but if you do, it will create an entry in the /etc/fstab record. Mounting from this, with the mount -a command fails for the reason outlined in 3.
When all has been 'corrected', and the device will mount on boot, the system is still unsatisfactory, since the device is mounted read only to the user, which makes copying files to the device difficult. I did find that by opening a file manager (Konqueror) as root, transfers can be made, but hardly a use of root in a resposible manner. It is only recently when pursuing another matter, in a wiki on another distro, that I came across the method of adding users, and consequently after a number of years of read only, as a user, I can now write to my shares.
If, Doktor, you are interested in my experiences with using the 'official' system, you can ask me of the results of an absolutely and only 'by the book' clean install of Mageia 6, on a new, just out of the shrink wrap 4TB HDD, on my other desktoip machine.
