As handy as mounting network shares via the mount
command can be, you may not want to manually mount a share each time you wish to use it. In a network with a central file server, it makes sense to configure workstations to mount network shares automatically so that every time you boot your system, the share will automatically be mounted and ready to go.
The tried and tested approach to mounting resources automatically is the /etc/fstab
file. Every Linux system has a /etc/fstab
file, so go ahead and look at yours. By default, this file only contains configuration for mounting your local resources, such as partitions on your hard disk. It's standard practice to add additional lines of configuration to this file to mount anything from additional hard drives to network shares.