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.baksudo cp /etc/pam.d/common-session /etc/pam.d/common-session.bak

Install required libraries

sudo apt install -y libpam-mount cifs-utils

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

<!--<luserconf name=".pam_mount.conf.xml" />-->

We will want to uncomment this by removing the leading and trailing comment lines and save the changes

<luserconf name=".pam_mount.conf.xml" />

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

Source: https://docs.binarybraids.com/linux/pam_mount/