Can't mount Windows shares by name, only IP

Question

I'm mounting a Windows share using the following in Ubuntu:

mount -t cifs username=MYUSER,password=1234 //192.168.1.5/myshare /mnt/windows_share

This works fine, but I would like to mount the share using the computer's hostname, not the IP.

I can ping the hostname fine, but I mounting using the hostname instead of the IP does not work. The share cannot be found.

In Windows, I can access the share as \\COMPUTER\\\myshare, and using Nautilus in Ubuntu, I can connect to //COMPUTER/myshare, but I can't use the name in the mount command.

Any ideas?

Solution

Do you have mount.cifs installed on your system? From the CIFS User Guide:

Once the CIFS VFS support is built into the kernel or installed as a module (cifs.o), you can use mount syntax like the following to access Samba or Windows servers:

mount -t cifs //9.53.216.11/e$ /mnt -o user=myname,pass=mypassword

If the mount helper, mount.cifs, is installed (which is usually the case for most Linux distributions), then a tcp host name rather than ip address may be used. For example,

mount -t cifs //my_server/e$ /mnt -o user=myname,pass=mypassword