Mounting an external drive with CIFS

Mounting an external drive on a CentOS 7 workstation or server is considered to be a relatively simple procedure and, in many respects, this will be a daily task for a seasoned troubleshooter. However, on some occasions the process itself does give rise to much confusion as to what steps are required and, with this in mind, it is our purpose to provide some much needed clarity.

We will begin by confirming whether cifs is installed. To do this, type the following command:

# rpm -q cifs-utils

CIFS, also known as the Common Internet File System, is a file sharing protocol that enables a standard for remote file access across many filesystems. Based on Server Message Block (SMB) and running over TCP/IP, cifs provides typical file operations such as open, close, read, write, safe caching, and seek. It supports extended non-filesystem attributes, batch requests, and distributed replicated virtual volumes. However, if the system replies in the following way...