Automatic remount cifs/SMB after short network interruption

A Windowsserver provides a network directory called data via CIFS/SMB protocol. The data folder is mounted on a Linux client with password and user authentification.

Sometimes the drive gets disconnected, but is available again after a second. I do not know exactly why, but it seems to be because of the Windows server or a broken network component.

How can I make Linux reconnect automatic as soon as possible?

I'd recommend mounting it via autofs. This is a service that will mount a directory on demand (for example if you cd into it or ls it) and unmount it automatically after a user defined timeout.

• Install the autofs package for your distribution (by the way, remember to include your distro in your questions since an answer's details may depend on it).

• Add the following to /etc/auto.master

  /media/[my_server] /etc/auto.[my_server]
  

  Where /media/[my_server] is the mount point of the share.

• Create a file /etc/autofs/auto.[my_server] with this line:

  [any_name] -fstype=cifs,[other_options] ://[remote_server]/[share_name]
  

For more information see here and here.

To add to the autofs answer, I recommend doing the the way it is described here:

https://andrewaadland.me/2017-06-18-autofs-nfs-and-archlinux-key-not-found-in-map-sources/

That is:

• Make the first field in auto.master is always /-.
• Use full mount name in /etc/autofs/auto.server.

So in my case, /etc/autofs/auto.master contains:

/-      /etc/autofs/auto.nas

And /etc/autofs/auto.nas contains:

/home/rkitover/nas -fstype=cifs,credentials=/home/rkitover/.nascredentials,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8 ://nas/rkitover

This works for me!