If you have to mount a share from an unreliable (in terms of “won’t be available 24/7) windows machine, using the traditional way with mount.cifs and /etc/fstab is a pain in the ass, since you will have to remount manually every now and then.

Let’s use the much better way with autofs:

We assume, that you want to mount your private “Documents” windows share from the machine with the IP address 192.168.1.116:

1. Install autofs: sudo apt-get install autofs
2. As root, add the following line to /etc/auto.master:

   /cifs /etc/auto.smb.top --timeout=60

   This line is used to check every 60 seconds for all potentially available smb shares to mount under /cifs.

3. Create as root /etc/auto.smb.top with the following content:

   * -fstype=autofs,-Dhost=& file:/etc/auto.smb.sub

   This simple line tries to mount everything from all smb hosts with a little help of /etc/auto.smb.sub

4. Create as root /etc/auto.smb.sub with the following content:

   * -fstype=cifs,credentials=/home/youruser/.smbcredentials,uid=1000,gid=100 ://${host}/&

   Here, you assign your smb credentials, which reside in /home/youruser/.smbcredentials:

5. Create as your user /home/youruser/.smbcredentials with the following content:

   username=yourwindowsusername
   password=yourwindowspassword

   Set its file rights to 600 with chmod 600 /home/youruser/.smbcredentials

6. Finally, restart the autofsservice as root with service autofs restart

Now you can access (or symlink) your windows share “Documents” under /cifs/192.168.1.116/Users/yourwindowsuername/Documents and you don’t have to worry any more about unresponsive windows shares, which block your file manager.

Credits go to the CentOS Wiki, which gave the idea at https://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/WindowsShares