About

This is a very simple Python script for generating /etc/fstab remote mounts, specifically catered towards Samba (SMB) shares.

I have a NAS with over 20 attached folders, so setting up shares manually would've taken too long and been too error-prone.

By filling out a simple CSV file and creating a credentials file, you can have a formatted /etc/fstab generated for you.

Setup/Usage

Step 1: Create the top-level directory for your shares folder and set the permissions. All of your mount points will live under here.

sudo mkdir <MY-SHARE-DIRECTORY>
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER <MY-SHARE-DIRECTORY>
sudo chmod 0777 -R <MY-SHARE-DIRECTORY>

Step 2: Create the CSV file describing your NAS configuration. (If you use Google Sheets, you can export it as a CSV.) The CSV must have 8 columns:

1. remote directory name
2. local directory path
3. file share type, e.g. cifs
4. credential file path - path to credentials file. You can use the included credential generator script. These are the credentials that you use to login to your NAS, not your Linux account credentials.
5. user id - Can be found using the id command. To avoiding hardcoding, you can also provide a user's name, or you can simply use "$USER" (no quotes) and it will automatically retrieve the user ID for the current user
6. group id - Same info as user id
7. file mode - The permissions for the files in the remote directory. Can be supplied via the usual octal flags or via symbolic permissions, e.g. "-rw-r--r--" or "0644"
8. directory mode - Same as file mode

Step 3: Identify the IP address of your NAS. I like to use the arp command for this.

Now, simply run the script

usage: fstab_generator_for_smb.py [-h] -f INPUT_CSV_FILE -i REMOTE_IP_ADDRESS [-r REMAINING_TEXT]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -f INPUT_CSV_FILE, --input-csv-file INPUT_CSV_FILE
                        The CSV filepath to read from
  -i REMOTE_IP_ADDRESS, --remote-ip-address REMOTE_IP_ADDRESS
                        The IP address of the remote share. Only tested with IPv4
  -r REMAINING_TEXT, --remaining-text REMAINING_TEXT
                        Any remaining text to add in the line

It'll produce the output that you need to then copy into your /etc/fstab file. Once the fstab file has been saved, open a separate terminal window with dmesg, and in the current one, do:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart remote-fs.target

You should then see a bunch of messages in the dmesg window about your mounts.

QNAP notes

QNAP users may need to add: nounix 0 0 to the end of each line (the "remaining text" section above)