What is the best-practice to add SMB shares to a Proxmox lxc?
reddit / selfhosted

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DatJonas01 · 2023-12-26 16:33

Hi everyone,

I run a VPS with Proxmox and want to add additional storage to one of
my lxc hosts. The storage need is mostly static data (syncthing for my
personal files, paperless-ngx media, eventually Immich photographs)
that exceeds the storage capacity of my VPS. I got myself a 1TB
Hetzner Storage Box and want to add it to my VPS.

Now I am wondering what is the prefered option:


1. Add the Storage Box as a SMB share in Proxmox and add it as a mount
point to the lxc container. This creates a .raw virtual file system on
the SMB share. The advantage I see using this approach is that I can
then use proxmox's backup feature or migrate the virtual disk in case
I get myself a NAS.
2. Mount the Storage Box inside the lxc via /etc/fstab. This would
mean that I could directly access my files on the Storage Box by
accessing it from another device. However, it makes migrating to
another storage location more difficult.

What would you suggest as a best practice in this case?

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cavernerg · 2023-12-26 16:59

I tried option one , but I keep running into issues with permissions.
On host I can read/write the SMB. But inside Lxc (unprivileged) not.
All googling (chown 100000 and so on) led to nothing.
Option 2 would require privileged lxc

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Anejey · 2023-12-27 07:06

You can get around the permissions issue by mounting the SMB share on
the host with the proper user.

I'll just copy-paste the guide from my notes, but not sure how the
formatting will hold.


# HOST

**Edit fstab**

```text-plain
//NAS/nas/ /mnt/lxc_shares/nas_rwx cifs _netdev,x systemd.automount,no
atime,uid=100000,gid=110000,dir_mode=0770,file_mode=0770,user=smb_user
name,pass=smb_password 0 0
```

> What this does, is mount the CIFS/SMB share onto the host with the
UID/GID that corresponds to the root inside LXC

**Create a mountpoint to the LXC**

`pct set VMID -mp0 /mnt/host,mp=/mnt/VM`

# LXC

**Add the SMB group, with the GID of 10000**
`groupadd -g 10000 smb`

**Add whatever user needs access to the share to the group**
`usermod -aG smb USERNAME`

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cavernerg · 2023-12-27 16:11

Awesome. This did the trick. And I tried maaany guides 😂

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cavernerg · 2023-12-27 18:05

And the next issue - postgres won't use smb volumes properly ...
Maaaahhhhhh... 🥴
Searching for next workaround