How to solve CIFS/Samba share mount error(13): Permission denied

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 9 comments

Published on January 4th 2022 - last updated on November 25th 2023 - Listed in Linux Windows Samba

---

There are a couple of ways how to mount a CIFS/Samba share on a Linux client. However some tutorials are outdated and meanwhile completely wrong. I just ran into a (stupid) case of a wrong mount.cifs syntax:

root@focal:~# mount -t cifs //server/Share /mnt -o rw,user=domain\myuser,password=secret
mount error(13): Permission denied
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs) and kernel log messages (dmesg)

Unfortunately, the additional output in dmesg is not helpful to figure out the problem:

root@focal:~# dmesg
[...]
[16444886.307684] CIFS: Attempting to mount //server/Share
[16444886.307717] No dialect specified on mount. Default has changed to a more secure dialect, SMB2.1 or later (e.g. SMB3), from CIFS (SMB1). To use the less secure SMB1 dialect to access old servers which do not support SMB3 (or SMB2.1) specify vers=1.0 on mount.
[16444886.539770] Status code returned 0xc000006d STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE
[16444886.539795] CIFS VFS: \\server Send error in SessSetup = -13
[16444886.539901] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -13

After additional try and errors (and looking up a recent share mount from the history), the problem turned out to be the user=domain\myuser syntax. This way of combining the domain/workgroup and the username is not working (anymore).

Note: Both user= and username= are accepted in the options.

Instead use:

root@focal:~# mount -t cifs "//server/Share" /mnt -o "user=myuser,password=secret,workgroup=DOMAIN"
root@focal:~# ll /mnt/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Sep  1  2020 _Archiv
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Aug  9 12:10 Client
[..]

This way it worked.

Of course the password should not be used on the command line, so for the final (and automatic) mount of the share use the following entry in /etc/fstab:

root@focal:~# cat /etc/fstab
[...]
# Mount CIFS share from server
//server/Share /mnt cifs rw,relatime,vers=3.1.1,credentials=/etc/samba/servershare.conf,uid=0 0 0

Where /etc/samba/servershare.conf contains the credentials:

root@focal:~# cat /etc/samba/servershare.conf
user=myuser
password=secret
domain=DOMAIN

Add a comment

Show form to leave a comment

Comments (newest first)

Steve White from Lebanon wrote on Mar 15th, 2024:

Sir, you are a genius

---

Edgardo Pannunzio (KERNEL Consultores) from Uruguay wrote on Feb 9th, 2023:

Thanks very much !!
Your post was really helpful.

---

Ed from wrote on Jan 27th, 2023:

In my case (mounting win 2019 share in RHEL9) when using double apostrophe: "user=myuser..." was outputing:
"bash: !,workgroup=$MY_DOMAIN: event not found"

Switching to single apostrophe 'user=mysers...' did the trick

---

ck from Switzerland wrote on Nov 29th, 2022:

Keith, make sure you have the cifs-utils and smbclient packages installed on your Ubuntu. Still an error? Try to connect to the share using the smbclient command. It could also be a SMB protocol mismatch. Check out this article, describing Samba protocol configuration on the client.

---

Keith from United States wrote on Nov 29th, 2022:

I've tried for the past 3 hours, 5AM in the morning now, and I've tried everything from every other website and this one and still get the exact same errors. Tried it with just sudo, then root. Same thing. Host OS is ubuntu server trying to mount a network share from my Synology NAS.

---

AJav from wrote on Sep 19th, 2022:

very good, Thanks !

---

simonpunk2016 from wrote on Aug 1st, 2022:

Thank you sir, never know the mount option has changed, because I just successfully mounted the cifs last month, thought my Manjaro has come to an end.

---

simonpunk2016 from wrote on Jul 29th, 2022:

Thank you sir, never know the mount option has changed, because I just successfully mounted the cifs last month, thought my Manjaro has come to an end.

---

Jesko from wrote on Feb 10th, 2022:

I had exact the same error, but different reason. On a freshly installed (old) Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (last 32Bit version). My reason was: There was no cifs-utils installed! so "sudo apt install cifs-utils" was the solution. I just write here because I crawled through hundreds of comments.

---