Long time linux user. Mostly xubuntu. So if you have any specific questions just ask.
Thank you for the quick reply!
It was about auto mounting shares on boot with fstab. I switched to Linux in the beginning of June and I've been trying to get this to work since then (almost 2 months).
At first I was running Debian 11 with Gnome and the following entry sort of worked:
/192.168.178.100/multimedia /media/multimedia cifs credentials=/etc/samba/credentials,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000,nofail
The strange thing was on the first boot of the day I would get a cifs permission 13 error, which the internet is filled with. Without doing anything and after rebooting instantly the mounted shares would work. Which made me believe or come to the conclusion that it was a 'time' issue. With that I mean, the system booted to quick for Linux to make a connection with the network shares. I experienced a similar problem with openelec/libreelec in the past and adding a boot delay for giving the system time to connect to the smb shares fixed that issue.
Though, the error 13 would often mention: "(Permission denied) opening credential file /etc/samba/credentials"
Indicating that the problem was with the credentials file, despite having chmod that file. I've been on and off for the past two months trying to fix this. Most people on various forums claimed that certain additions/flags to the 'mount path' in the fstab file could or would fix the issues, nothing did... I tried so many adaptations and the error would always be the same (cifs error 13).
Today I've been at it a couple of hours again. A few days ago I did a clean install of Debian 12 because I wanted to switch to KDE Plasma instead of Gnome. Note, that after updating my Debian 11 to 12 (with Gnome) the line in the fstab 'worked' as before.
The exact same line does nothing on KDE Plasma, so I went at it today again and changed a couple of things of which one thing I hadn't tried yet. In my credential file I added: domain=WORKGROUP
I tried tons of different versions, like domain=192.168.178.100 / WORKGROUP=192.168.178.100 / domain="nameNAS" etc etc
Hadn't seen the "domain=WORKGROUP" mentioned before, so I guess I'd try it out. The line in my fstab is now:
//192.168.178.100/multimedia /media/multimedia cifs credentials=/etc/samba/credentials,uid=1000,gid=1000,x-systemd.automount 0 0
I tried the "x-systemd.automount" and "0 0" and endless other additions/flags before and nothing ever worked, it always resulted in the infamous error 13. A few days I came accross the "sec=..." flag, I tried a couple like sec=ntlm and sec=sec=ntlmssp, but that didn't work either. It seems to be deprecated now since Linux 6+ apparently? dmesg told me "VFS: bad security option: ntlm". Though dmesg hardly tells you anything useful regarding mounting network drives.
So sorry for the long story, it seems to be working now. But I'll have to check tomorrow morning when I boot my PC for the first time that day. Because for some weird reason that seems to matter...
edit: spelling and formatting
