Experiencing the following error when mounting a Windows CIFS share on a Linux machine?
CIFS: Unable to determine destination address
As suggested by the message, it technically should be the FQDN defined for the file server does not resolve. This is the most common issue for this error, to find out if it is your case, try resolving the FQDN from the client machine (assuming your server FQDN is fileserver.domain.tld) :
dig fileserver.domain.tld +short
If it resolve properly, look at the “dmesg” output :
dmesg
Look for the following from the output at the time you last attempted the mount :
[14751303.299902] CIFS: No dialect specified on mount. Default has changed to a more secure dialect, SMB2.1 or later (e.g. SMB3.1.1), from CIFS (SMB1). To use the less secure SMB1 dialect to access old servers which do not support SMB3.1.1 (or even SMB3 or SMB2.1) specify vers=1.0 on mount. [14751303.299916] CIFS: Unable to determine destination address [14751545.801979] CIFS: Unable to determine destination address [14751881.865286] CIFS: Unable to determine destination address
This output appears to be cosmetic (and mostly will be for shares on recent enough version of Windows or Samba), and we now know that the FQDN resolve properly from the client machine. Make sure that the server is indeed not serving shares as SMB v1, if this is not the case, then it is most likely be caused because you are missing the CIFS client/utilities on the client machine.
Check for the following packages if that are present on your client machine :
keyutils cifs-utils
Note : Use the “apt-cache policy” command to find out.
If missing, install them and attempt the mount operation again :
apt install keyutils cifs-utils