Matthias' personal blog

Getting my Seagate NAS to mount again (CIFS/SMB v 1.0)

Posted November 17th 2017

About a month ago, my Seagate GoFlex NAS failed to mount. The problem was that linux kernel 4.13 changed the default protocol version to one which the NAS doesn't support. Solution is to add 'vers=1.0' to the options in fstab.

Symptoms

My NAS didn't mount on reboot after a Debian upgrade about a month ago. Mounting manually got me a pretty useless error message:

  # mount -t cifs "//192.168.1.3/GoFlex Home Backup" /mnt --verbose -o username=XXXXXX -o password=XXXXXXX
mount.cifs kernel mount options: ip=192.168.1.3,unc=\\192.168.1.3\GoFlex Home Backup,user=XXXXX,pass=********
mount error(112): Host is down
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

Actual problem

The actual problem is that the kernel now uses SMB protocol version 3.0 by default. The man page, MOUNT.CIFS(8) claims the opposite, but it's dated 2010, so not very surprising.

Fix

Add the 'vers=1.0' option, either via -o or in /etc/fstab

Maybe a better fix

A longer term fix would be to run better NAS software on the GoFlex, something that could talk SMB 3.0. Seagate's software isn't great, it wants flash (!) for the HTTP config interface and I haven't been able to update the firmware for several years.

OpenStora looks like it could work. The SSH login instructions on that page worked fine, I can see the GoFlex is running a kernel from 2010.

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