When working with CIFS mounts across heterogeneous environments, passing credentials securely becomes crucial. While /etc/fstab handles this elegantly, the direct mount.cifs command requires special attention to authentication parameters.

The key difference between fstab and command-line mounting lies in option parsing. In fstab, commas separate options naturally, but at the command line we need proper escaping:

# Incorrect way (your current attempt):
mount.cifs //myserverhere.com/cifs_share /mnt/cifs_share user,uid=65001,rw,workgroup=DEV,credentials=/root/.cifs

# Correct syntax:
mount.cifs //myserverhere.com/cifs_share /mnt/cifs_share -o user=ouruser,uid=65001,rw,workgroup=DEV,credentials=/root/.cifs

For production systems, consider these security best practices:

chmod 600 /root/.cifs
chown root:root /root/.cifs

If you're scripting this in Perl, you might want to consider these patterns:

# Method 1: Using environment variables
$ENV{'USER'} = 'ouruser';
$ENV{'PASSWORD'} = 'ourpassword';
system("mount.cifs //server/share /mnt -o uid=65001,rw");

# Method 2: Temporary credential file
my $temp_cred = "/tmp/cifs_cred_$$";
open(my $fh, '>', $temp_cred) or die $!;
print $fh "username=ouruser\npassword=ourpassword\n";
close($fh);
system("mount.cifs //server/share /mnt -o credentials=$temp_cred");
unlink $temp_cred;

When encountering issues, these debugging commands help:

# Check if CIFS is supported
modprobe cifs
lsmod | grep cifs

# Verbose output
mount.cifs -v //server/share /mnt -o credentials=/path/to/file

For your macOS/Linux hybrid environment, consider these unified approaches:

# macOS equivalent (using AppleScript for permissions)
osascript -e 'mount volume "smb://ouruser:ourpassword@myserverhere.com/cifs_share"'

When mounting CIFS shares, the most secure method is using a credentials file rather than passing credentials directly in commands. Here's the correct format for your credentials file /root/.cifs:

username=ouruser
password=ourpassword
domain=DEV  // optional but recommended

The issue in your command is the comma-separated options format. Here's the correct way:

mount -t cifs //myserverhere.com/cifs_share /mnt/cifs_share -o credentials=/root/.cifs,uid=65001,rw,workgroup=DEV

Several factors could cause mounting failures:

• File permissions: chmod 600 /root/.cifs
• Missing dependencies: apt install cifs-utils
• Incorrect workgroup specification

For scripting purposes, you might consider these variations:

# Using environment variables
mount.cifs //server/share /mnt -o user=$CIFS_USER,pass=$CIFS_PASS

# Using command substitution (less secure)
mount.cifs //server/share /mnt -o user=$(cat /tmp/user),pass=$(cat /tmp/pass)

Here's a Perl snippet that handles both Linux and macOS mounts:

sub mount_cifs {
    my ($server, $share, $mountpoint, $credpath) = @_;
    if ($^O eq 'linux') {
        system("mount -t cifs //$server/$share $mountpoint -o credentials=$credpath");
    } elsif ($^O eq 'darwin') {
        system("mount -t smbfs //user:pass\@$server/$share $mountpoint");
    }
}