I got myself a Buffalo Linkstation (NAS) and got some Linux experiences with it the tough way. Especially I’ve had my share of learning, man’ing when trying to mount this beast. So I hope that sharing this will help somebody getting an easy experience.
This is based on a live Ubuntu 10.04. Linux is not officially supported by Buffalo and what you do is on your own risk.
Prerequisites
To be able to mount, you need the smbfs package as it contains mount.cifs:
sudo apt-get install smbfs
Mounting Linkstation
We need to ensure that some important things are in place when mounting
The IP address is 192.168.1.36 and the shared directory is “share”
First argument is //192.168.1.36/share. Remember the leading double slash or it will fail.
We would like to mount at /media/linkstation
Second argument is /media/linkstation. Remember to create the directory.
The charset must be correct. Otherwise, “Røde Mor” becomes “R├╕de Mor”
use options iocharset=utf8,codepage=cp437. Don’t ask me why, but I guess that it has something to do with the codepage that Windows uses
The user/group must match be “ubuntu” (default is root)
use options uid=999,gid=999. “999″ is looked up in /etc/passwd.
Linkstation shall use the guest account and avoid password
option guest
now, the full command line becomes
sudo mount.cifs //192.168.1.36/share /media/linkstation -oguest,uid=999,gid=999,iocharset=utf8,codepage=cp437
Remember the -o or the options will be silently ignored :pinch:
Now, the Linkstation is nicely mounted and the file names are encoded correctly. To unmount, simply type
sudo unmount /media/linkstation
Happy Linkstation’ing!
