Mounting CIFS in CentOS 7

• Server

The Problem

Most of my servers (virtual machines) are running CentOS 6, but the new ones run CentOS 7. This morning I setup a new CentOS 7 box and was trying to mount a CIFS storage share to it. I copied the line in /etc/fstab that mounts the share, created the secure credentials file, and the mount directory. However, when I ran mount /mnt/share it failed with the following error:

mount error(5): Input/output error
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

I checked, double checked, and rechecked every character in /etc/fstab. Everything was spot on. I was DuckDuckGoing the error message, cifs mounting instructions, /etc/fstab syntax, etc.. Nothing.

The Solution

It turns out that in CentOS 7, with cifs-utils 6.2 vs 4.8 in CentOS 6), you need to specify the security mode that you are using. In this case, I needed to add sec=ntlm to my mount command in /etc/fstab. The line ended up looking like:

//10.2.1.2	/mnt/share	cifs	credentials=/etc/samba/credentials/private,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,sec=ntlm	0 0

According the to cifs-utils man page, the default security mode is ntlm, so you shouldn’t have to specify it. But you do. If you can provide any rhyme or reason, I’d be interested.

sec=
	Security mode. Allowed values are:
	• none attempt to connection as a null user (no name)
	• krb5 Use Kerberos version 5 authentication
	• krb5i Use Kerberos authentication and forcibly enable packet signing
	• ntlm Use NTLM password hashing (default)
	• ntlmi Use NTLM password hashing and force packet signing
	• ntlmv2 Use NTLMv2 password hashing
	• ntlmv2i Use NTLMv2 password hashing and force packet signing
	• ntlmssp Use NTLMv2 password hashing encapsulated in Raw NTLMSSP message
	• ntlmsspi Use NTLMv2 password hashing encapsulated in Raw NTLMSSP message, and force packet signing