How-To smbfs: smbmnt must be installed suid root

Quite often, when using program such as smb4k, I encountered the following error:

smbmnt must be installed suid root for direct user mounts

This happens because some linux distribution does not configure smbfs properly such as a normal user can mount samba files.

This how-to will show how to simply resolve this issue.

smb4k, a QT base samba client uses smbfs in order to mount the remote samba shares under a normal user home directory. If smbmnt and smbumount are not set uid root, smb4k will fail mounting the remote directory.

The message is explicit enough, you need to set uid root those files. Here is what you need to type in a console to resolve this:

sudo chmod u+s `which smbmnt`

in order to be able to mount the shared directory , and:

sudo chmod u+s `which smbumount`

in order to be able to umount the shared directory.

That’s it, you can now mount and use the remote files as a normal user, and use those files like if there were on your local disk.