As discussed here, I have Seagate Ultra Slim USB 3 attached to my wifi router as a NAS (Network-attached storage). It provides a good backup/sharing storage for my home network that’s accessible from all my home computing devices, which was nice.

Accessing it from Windows is easy to set up, all I needed to do was to map a drive. Accessing it from Linux needs some additional work, but it turned out to be not too bad either.

Initially I created an entry in /etc/fstab. It uses the cifs protocol. Some cursory research shows that cifs is old and oboselete, but I’m not sure of other ways of accessing it. As I mentioned in that post, I had to put in the ver=1.0 option for it to work, something I don’t like.

Anyway, the drawback of /etc/fstab entry is that my Linux system would try to mount it before establishing network access, which doesn’t work for obvious reasons. I had to “sudo mount -a” afterwards. That is manual and gets tedious real fast.

So I did some research. One solution was to use _netdev option in the fstab entry, which didn’t work for me. The other was to use the auto option, which didn’t work either.

In the end, what worked for me was using systemd. Here are two articles that I relied to get mine going.

Tomáš Tomeček, Automatic mounts with systemd
Michael Albert, Systemd: (Auto-) Mount cifs shares This article has good examples for cifs options. Yes, I had to use the ver=1.0.

Thanks guys!