smb mount cannot sync file automatically

Question

Under Ubuntu, I use smb to mount the directory of the server(Ubuntu too), and set to a local directory, like /home/username/server. When I change some files of local directory, the files in the server change too. However, when I change some files of the server, the files in local directory don't change.

Does someone know what the reason is ? And could someone fix it and make local changes updated to the server so that I could edit local and make in the server？

I use mount.smbfs. Besides, after changing to mount.cifs, it is all the same. However, there is no cache option in my mount.cifs version.

Answer 1

In my situation, I have to connect to the server, and I don't have root permission, so deploying NFS may not work for me. The administrator may not install it.

This way, I don't have to install any other software, just install SMB, then in the file directory, input smb://xxx.xxx.xxx.xx/ to visit the server files.

I use mount command with smbfs to map the server files to local directory. The command is like this:

mount -t smbfs -o rw,username=xx,password=xx,gid=xx,uid=xx server/dir local/dir

Answer 2

The local computer (SMB client) caches accessed files. If you use mount -t cifs, try adding cache=strict, strictcache or cache=none to the mount options.

Answer 3

I have had this problem recently. I continually read a binary file on the server, and it was updating very sporadically (sometimes not at all). I fixed this behaviour by adding the directio switch into the options used in my fstab.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/man8/mount.cifs.8.html

Here is the line in my fstab now:

//server/share /mnt/smbmount cifs credentials=/root/secure/cred,directio 0 0