I am trying to mount a cifs share aka smaba/smb/windows share, from a Debian server so I can access log files when needed. To do this automatically I create two mounts, one which is read only and is automatically mounted and another that is read/write which is not mounted. The /etc/fstab file looks a bit like this:

//10.10.10.10/d /mnt/server-d cifs auto,rw,credentials=/root/.ssh/server.credentials,domain=10.10.10.10 0 0
//10.10.10.10/d /mnt/server-d-rw cifs noauto,ro,credentials=/root/.ssh/server.credentials,domain=10.10.10.10 0 0

To mount all the drives with “auto” in the /etc/fstab file you can use the “-a, –all” option . From the man page, Mount all filesystems (of the given types) mentioned in fstab (except for those whose line contains the noauto keyword). The filesystems are mounted following their order in fstab.

However when I ran the command I get:

root@server:~# mount -a
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //10.10.10.10/d,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
(for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might
need a /sbin/mount. helper program)

In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so.

Well it turns out that Debian is no longer shipping cifs as a default option. It can be added easyly enough using the command:

root@server:~# aptitude install cifs-utils

Now mount -a works fine

root@server:~# mount -a
root@server:~#