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Create a systemd SMB mount on Debian Linux

Recently while I was working in my homelab I came across the need to mount some SMB shares to my LXC containers. The shares needed to persist through reboots as well and I wanted to create a systemd unit to accomplish these tasks.

  1. Install cifs-utils via apt:
apt install cifs-utils -y
  1. Next we need to create a set of credentials for the CIFS share to use:
nano /root/.cifs_credentials
username=usernamehere
password=insertpasswordhere
  1. Create a directory to mount your CIFS share on:
mkdir -p /mnt/exampledir
  1. Identify the id of the user and group of your currently logged in user. In my case I was logged in as root.
id -u root && id -g root

Save the id from this command to be used in the next step. 5. Create the systemd unit and insert the following contents into the file:

nano /etc/systemd/system/mnt-media.mount

  1. Insert the following into the new .mount file:

    [Unit]
     Description=Media Server files
     Requires=network-online.target
     After=network-online.target

    [Mount]
     What=//192.168.0.1/media/
     Where=/mnt/media
     Options=credentials=/root/.cifs_credentials,uid=0,gid=0
     Type=cifs

    [Install]
     WantedBy=multi-user.target

  2. Enable systemd-networkd-wait-online. systemd-networkd-wait-online is a oneshot system service that waits for the network to be configured. Without this enabled our new systemd service will fail to run on a server boot up.

sudo systemctl enable systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
  1. Enable the new systemd service.
systemctl enable mnt-media.mount
  1. Reboot your server for changes to take affect. If you experience any issues check the journalctl logs.