SAMBA – How to install the Samba Client

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last Updated: 8/28/2022

Samba is designed for Unix like systems to provide file and print services to to windows clients. You can run Samba as a client to reach Windows resources or as a service to provide this functionality to Windows clients.

SAMBA Client:

apt install samba-client samba-common  -y

Now let’s see what client shares are available. (and presuming you have a /mnt/share)

smbclient -U user -L 192.168.1.100

Knowing that, let’s make use of it.

# mount -t cifs -o username=user //192.168.1.100/python /mnt/share

Password for user@//192.168.1.100/python:  ********

If this is an older machine or a NAS (Netgear etc) you may see something like:

root@server1:/home/user/dev# smbclient -U user -L 192.168.1.100
protocol negotiation failed: NT_STATUS_CONNECTION_DISCONNECTED

This is a sign that you are working with some older protocols and you are going to need to do a little editing to enable negotiation with older protocols. In this case you would need to edit:

/etc/samba/smb.conf

You would want to add the following under the [global] section.

client min protocol = NT1

Now you are ready to test again:

root@server1:/etc/samba# smbclient  -L \\192.168.1.100
Enter WORKGROUP\user's password:

        Sharename       Type      Comment
        ---------       ----      -------
        IPC$            IPC       IPC Service (nas9)
        youtube         Disk
        python          Disk

Reconnecting with SMB1 for workgroup listing.

        Server               Comment
        ---------            -------

        Workgroup            Master
        ---------            -------
        WORKGROUP            NAS9

We are now ready to mount the drive! When doing so we we might get something like

mount: /mnt/python: bad option; for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might need a /sbin/mount.<type> helper program.

Which means we don’t have the ability to manage CIF yet so we need to install:

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

Now we are ready to try again. Also, In this example problem we were connecting to an older NAS, when running mount this may present a problem. While using “mount” you may need to add a parameter specifying your preference to connect using the older SMB1.

mount -t cifs -o vers=1.0  //192.168.1.100/python /mnt/python

Please see the articled “Samba Server” to learn how to install and administrate a samba server.