pam_mount for network shares
If you have network shares in your environment that you want to automount on login without reconfiguring fstab entries then pam_mount is a good candidate. This is especially useful if you have a centralised LDAP server which you use for authentication.
This tutorial assumes that you want to mount CIFS shares and are using a Debian based distribution
Backup existing pam configuration
sudo cp /etc/pam.d/common-auth /etc/pam.d/common-auth.bak
sudo cp /etc/pam.d/common-session /etc/pam.d/common-session.bak
Install required libraries
Enable user pam_mount configuration
Now we will want to configure a user specific pam_mount config. In order to do this we need to make some changes to the global pam_mount.conf.xml file located in /etc/security
Open the pam_mount.conf.xml in your chosen text editor and locate the following lines of text
We will want to uncomment this by removing the leading and trailing comment lines and save the changes
Create user pam_mount configuration file
You can now make a user pam mount configuration file within your home directory. The file name has to be .pam_mount.conf.xml
Create the new configuration file with the following parameters (replacing the User, Mount Point, Path and Server configuration as required) and save the changes
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<pam_mount>
<volume options="nodev,nosuid" user="example-user" mountpoint="~/shares/share1" path="share1" server="dc.example.com" fstype="cifs" />
</pam_mount>
Test mount points
You can now logoff and login again and the mountpoints should be present within the specified mountpoint locations