Thanks,
altair4, for this. It was (almost) exactly what I needed. Here's my experience of following it.
I finally got a hub from my ISP with a working USB port, and attached the SSD from my old laptop. I could get at it via the File/Connect to server... route in Nemo but wanted a less irritating method. Got my id, made sure cifs was up-to-date (it was), did
sudo mkdir /media/NAS
and I was ready for testing.
sudo mount -t cifs //vodafone.broadband/sabrent_1_d2c2 /media/NAS -o guest,uid=1000,vers=2.1
connected the share, and displayed the mount point on the desktop, in the file manager, and the removable icon applet on the panel. Since the hub generates a samba share, that gave me all the access I really need. Ready for automation via fstab! I put the following line in fstab:
//vodafone.broadband/sabrent_1_d2c2 /media/NAS cifs guest,noauto,user,uid=1000,vers=2.1 0 0
and rebooted. This is where things deviated a bit from my expectations:
In use this will be seamless:
*** When you need access to the share simply access the icon in the file manager or in your application and fstab will do the rest
*** When you are done using it you can use the little mount icon next to the name to unmount it if there is one for your desktop or right click it to unmount it.
but there was no desktop icon, nothing in the file manager, and no panel applet.
Have I misunderstood something? I'm running Mint 20.1 Cinnamon, by the way. Perhaps something has changed since the tutorial was written?
I poked around a bit to see what had happened and found that if I clicked on the Computer icon on the desktop, the NAS folder was shown and the share was accessible (and the icons all appeared), so the fstab entry was doing something, just not generating the udisks response I expected to see after logging in. Further research showed me I could run
mount /media/NAS
and doing so also produced all the expected mount point icons. It looks like the mount point icons are generated only when the share is actually mounted.
As a work-around, I created a startup application to run that command. This may be useful for someone else with the same issue but I feel it rather defeats the object of 'On Demand CIFS Mounting of Shares'.
But, all-in-all, a very useful tutorial, even after almost 5 years. Thanks again!