Add Samba mount to Proxmox Container

Do you have some data that you have stored on a NAS and do you want to share it with a Proxmox container? This article will explain how to add a Samba share to your Proxmox Container.

Prerequisites

For this article, we assume that you already have a NAS configured with Samba. Additionally, we also assume that you have a Proxmox server setup with a Debian container.

Setup

When adding a Samba share normally you would edit the /etc/fstab file and it would work. However, this does not work for Proxmox containers unless it is unprivileged. Since making a container unprivileged adds security risks I wanted to find another solution. The found solution is to add the mount to the Proxmox host and then share it as a mount point to the container.

Configure Proxmox Container

First, we have to add a group to the container which will be mapped later to the host. Do this by running:

groupadd -g 10000 lxc_shares

Now add your user to the newly created group by running:

usermod -aG lxc_shares root

Now make sure that the folder you want to mount to later exists (i.e. mkdir -p /mnt/media). For the next steps on the Proxmox host, this container must be shut down!

Configure Proxmox Host

On the host create the folder for your mount (i.e. mkdir -p /mnt/lxc_shares/media). Now edit the /etc/fstab file and add the following line (make sure to tweak it to your needs!):

# Mount CIFS share on demand for use in LXCs
//__NAS_IP__/__SHARE__/ /mnt/lxc_shares/media cifs _netdev,x-systemd.automount,noatime,uid=100000,gid=110000,dir_mode=0770,file_mode=0770,user=__USERNAME__,pass=__PASSWORD__ 0 0

Now inform the system that you changed the file using systemctl daemon-reload. Mount the share by running mount /mnt/lxc_shares/media or mount -a to mount all the drives. Now add a mount point to your preferred Proxmox container by editing /etc/pve/lxc/__LXC_ID__.conf:

mp0: /mnt/lxc_shares/media/,mp=/mnt/media,ro=1

Make sure to validate that you do not overwrite other mount points and remove ro=1 if you want more permissions than read-only. More information about the parameters can be found at pve.proxmox.com. Now start your Proxmox container and validate if the mount is successful.

Sources

• Tutorial: Unprivileged LXCs – Mount CIFS shares (forum.proxmox.com)