Command Line Access To Windows Shares
Recently for work I had to access a Windows share on an office NAS. The box is a typical off-the-shelf NAS. The office workers use Windows desktops. The NAS is configured to share files through Samba.
The MATE Caja file manager provides a simple menu option to access remote servers. This works rather well. That is, after I searched the web and figured out that on CentOS 7 I had to install the gvfs-smb package to get Caja to support Windows shares.
My challenge was I had a large VirtualBox vdi file to copy to the NAS. I did not want to do this through a GUI file manager. Using a terminal is much faster. The impression is that the mounted Windows share is specific to the file manager environment. Running the df or mount command does not show the mounted Windows share.
I grudgingly used the GUI file manager to copy the file. Yes, that was the Jeopardy theme song playing in the background.
I let the matter rest for a day and then dug deeper.
The Caja file manager uses gvfs-mount to mount a Windows share. The location of the mount point depends on the distro. For CentOS 7, which I am using to isolate personal and business work flows, the location is /run/user/$UID/gvfs.
After finding the mount point I now am able to access the Windows share from the terminal.
Using Caja I created a bookmark to the Office NAS. As my virtual machine environment is encrypted, I configured Caja to store the user name and password. The credentials are stored in a keyring at $HOME/.local/share/keyrings/login.keyring. Now I need only select the bookmark, pop open a terminal, and cd to /run/user/$UID/gvfs.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: CentOS, MATE
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