[ale] Automatic and Persistent share mount on Windows 2008 R2?

[Phil Turmel]

On 08/22/2014 05:29 PM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:

> We need to try to mount to a Windows 2008 R2 server.   Today I got as
> far as being able to login to the Windows server and map the share to
> a drive letter then verify I could read and write from it.
> 
> The issue is that CIFS mount:
> 
> a)      Is only available to the user I logged in as when I did the
> map on the Windows side.   (This was also true when I had the Windows
> Admin do it using the domain administrative account.)
> 
> b)      Is not available to the services that were already started
> automatically at boot.   It is these services that will be writing to
> and reading from the drive.
> 
> So my question is how can I setup an automatic mount of a share in
> Windows at boot AND insure that services started will have access to
> read and write to it?

I ran into this some years ago...  If I recall correctly, you can't.  At
least, not for the LOCALSYSTEM account that services are typically
installed as.  That account doesn't have network access.

If you run the service under a specific user, the service will have
network access, but only with "\\server\sharename" path syntax, and only
if you've arranged some form of automatic authentication for that user
on the target (domain membership, sync'ed passwords, etc).

> We did in fact try to enable NFS Services on the Windows server today
> but for whatever reason it puked on doing that each time and forced a
> reboot.    If someone knows how to enable that on Windows 2008 R2 as
> well as how to make a mount there persistent (similar to the way it
> would be if in fstab on UNIX/Linux) I’d be happy to go that route
> instead.

Never tried NFS on Windows.  Just the idea makes me queasy.  Sorry.

> Please don’t point me at links that “might address” this if you
> haven’t already tried them and know they work.  After working most of
> the week on this I’ve not found anything that really solves it in
> many web searches.

I'm not linking anything, as I don't know of any solutions that meet
your criteria.  Hope you can use the work-around.

Phil