How to allow group permissions to write/delete a CIFS mounted drive

[muzicman0 84]

It took me way too long to figure this out, and not at all sure there isn't a way to do this easier, but this is working.  I used shared drives (SMB) for all of my media files, so my TV, Recorded TV, and movies all reside on a remote disk.

I mount the SMB shares in my fstab file at boot with something like this (disclaimer: I am using Ubuntu 24.04):

//10.3.0.140/Movies /media/Movies  cifs credentials=/home/muzicman0/.smbcredentials,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
//10.3.0.140/TV/TV /media/TV  cifs credentials=/home/muzicman0/.smbcredentials,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

The Problem: my normal login user can write or delete files/folder, but my group can only read.  So even though I added the 'emby' user to my group, I couldn't delete files from within Emby.

The solution: I changed each mount line in my fstab to something like this:

//10.3.0.140/Movies /media/Movies  cifs credentials=/home/muzicman0/.smbcredentials,file_mode=0770,dir_mode=0770,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
//10.3.0.140/TV/TV /media/TV  cifs credentials=/home/muzicman0/.smbcredentials,file_mode=0770,dir_mode=0770,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

This now allows group read & write, not just read.  I think technically it allows execute as well.  You'll also need cifs-utils installed to mount via CIFS:

sudo apt install cifs-utils

The command to add the emby user into your username group (uid/gid 1000 in my example above) is:

usermod -a -G {group_name} emby

You may need to preface that command with sudo, don't remember for sure.  If you get a permission denied, then use sudo.

Once the above is done, you either reboot, or re-mount your drives.

I hope this helps someone.

 

[Luke 42077]

Thanks for sharing. I'm sure this will be useful.

[muzicman0 84]

I can't figure out how to edit my post for some reason, but I was going to add that something I didn't think about was that my Backups also go to a remote SMB drive, so I had to also do the same thing for that mount.

[EDIT: Weird, this post shows me as the author and lets me edit.  the OP doesn't.]

Edited April 28, 2025 by muzicman0
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