Why Is My Machine Unable to Mount My Smb Drives ("Cifs Vfs: Error Connecting to Socket. Aborting Operation", Return Code -115)?
I Have a Machine Running Precise (12.04 X64), and I Cannot Mount My Smb Drives. It Used to Work (A Week or Two Ago) and I Didn't Touch Fstab! the Machine...
I have a machine running Precise (12.04 x64), and I cannot mount my SMB drives. It used to work (a week or two ago) and I didn't touch fstab! The machine hosting the shares is a commercial NAS, and I'm not seeing anything that would indicate it's an issue with the NAS.
I have an older machine which I updated to Precise at the same time (both fresh installed, not dist-upgrade), so should have a very similar configuration. It is not having any problems. I am not having problems on windows machines/partitions either, only one of my Precise machines.
The two machines are using identical entries in fstab and identical /etc/samba/smb.conf files. I don't think I've ever changed smb.conf (has never mattered before).
My fstab entries all basically look like this:
//<share_path> /media/<share_name> cifs credentials=/home/downbeat/.credentials,iocharset=utf8,uid=downbeat,gid=downbeat,file_mode=0644,dir_mode=0755 0 0
Here's the dmesg output on boot:
[ 51.162198] CIFS VFS: Error connecting to socket. Aborting operation
[ 51.162369] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -115
[ 51.194106] CIFS VFS: Error connecting to socket. Aborting operation
[ 51.194250] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -115
[ 51.198120] CIFS VFS: Error connecting to socket. Aborting operation
[ 51.198243] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -115
There are no other errors I see in the dmesg output.
Again, it used to work; now it doesn't. Very similarly configured machine works (but some packages are out of date on the working machine). The NAS has only one interface/IP address, nmblookup works to find it's IP from it's hostname (from the machine with the issue) and it responds to a ping. Please any help would be great.
2 Answers
I found that switching off IPv6 solved a very similar problem for me. My Ubuntu 12.04 box is hooked up to an enterprise network dominated by Windows users and I don't have any authority over the server. Following the tutorial at solved my problem. (Save a click: Edit /etc/sysctl.conf to insert three lines of the form "net.ipv6.conf.*.disable_ipv6 = 1", replacing * with "all", "lo", and "default"; then give the shell command "sudo sysctl -p".)
My internal IP ended up in my NAS's blocklist. I removed it; problem solved. Used smbclient to troubleshoot.
EDIT: I am much more familiar with GNU/Linux these days, and if I were attempting to debug this today, I would check out hosts.deny and iptables, one of which (or both) is likely used to implement the blocklist/blacklist in my now decommissioned commercial NAS.
Marcus Vance is a cybersecurity auditor and technology writer dedicated to educating the public about online safety, data privacy regulations, enterprise security, and emerging cyber threats.
