[Ubuntu] Temporarily / Permanently Mount Cifs Network Shares

It is strange that Ubuntu 12.10 doesn't come with cifs-utils installed. Whenever you try to mount a network folder via mount -t cifs -o username=user,password=pass //server-name/shared /mnt/shared, it will give you the following error message:

1:  mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //192.168.0.11/Dropbox,  
2:      missing codepage or helper program, or other error  
3:      (for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might  
4:      need a /sbin/mount.<type> helper program)  
5:      In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try  
6:      dmesg | tail or so  

Execute dmesg | tail will return the following result:

1:  [ 5537.959706] CIFS VFS: Connecting to DFS root not implemented yet  
2:  [ 5537.959815] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22  

To solve this, simply apt-get install cifs-utils. After that run the same command again and you should be able to mount the network shared folder.

To permanently mount the shared folders, go to /etc/fstab, and add the following line:

1:  //server-name/shared     /mnt/shared     cifs     defaults,_netdev,credentials=/home/user/.smbcredentials     0     0  

_netdev parameter is being explained at the last section of this documentation, which in general mean connect only when network is available:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MountWindowsSharesPermanently

credentials and /home/user/.smbcredentials is a file created to store the username and password for the remote login, so that we don't put these sensitive info at risk because the /etc/fstab can be viewed by every users on the system. DO NOT forget to set the file permission for the .smbcredentials:

1:  chmod 600 /home/user/.smbcredentials  

Now enjoy working with your network shares!

If you would like to read on, the following articles is good to go:

1. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Samba/SambaClientGuide
2. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently
3. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MountWindowsSharesPermanently