[Samba] mounting a Samba volume on startup

[Mladen Gavrilovic]

Hi all, I've been trying to get an answer to this question for a long 
time and in a lot of different places, but no luck.

Basically I want to mount an XP volume on my Linux machine at boot time 
over Samba.  The network is just an XP box and a Linux box, connected by 
a crossover cable.  The XP box is a gateway to the net (don't ask), with 
two NICs, one internal, and one going to the DSL modem.

Samba seems to be working correctly, I don't have any problems browsing 
or transferring files from either end.  However, no matter what I do, I 
can't mount a volume off the XP machine at bootup.  I always get the error:

<some nonsense number>: Tree connect failed. ERRDOS - ERRnoaccess 
(Access denied.)  Samba connection failed.

Or something like that.  The number always changes, but the message is 
always the same.  The thing is, immediately after bootup I can mount the 
volume without any problem as root.

The suggestions that I've gotten so far are:

Make the smbmount and smbumount scripts root, or use sudo.  This won't 
work because a) the message isn't "Only root can mount this" as it is 
when it's a permissions problem, b) the scripts STILL don't work even 
when they're suid root, and c) sudo would only allow a normal user to 
mount it AFTER boot, which is not what I'm looking for.

Look into the automounter.  I don't think this is necessary because when 
I was using RH 7, everything worked fine without the automounter...  I 
just put in "mount -t smbfs etc, etc" into rc.local.  Now, in RH 7.2 
(with 2.4.18 kernel), it doesn't anymore.  Even Red Hat's own script 
which was designed to mount SMB volumes specifically, doesn't work.  It 
gives the same message.

So does ANYONE have a Samba volume being mounted on bootup?  And if yes, 
how are you doing it?

Thanks,
Mladen

P.S.  I also have a printer connected to the WinXP machine that works 
fine on the Linux machine over Samba.  I don't know if this has anything 
to do with anything or not.  Probably not :)