In part-1, I discussed how to mount a read-only NTFS USB drive into your XenServer filesystem.

In part-2, I discussed formatting a USB drive exclusively for XenServer.

In this week's installment, I'll talk about Accessing CIFS shares in XenServer.

There's actually a simpler way to read and write to an NTFS partition from XenServer, but you'll need to plug your USB drive into a Windows machine and share it. Once shared, and knowing the share name, and the IP address of your Windows machine, you can use the following example mount commands:

mount //192.168.1.51/ShareName /mnt

or
mount //192.168.1.51/Sharename /mnt -o username=olivierw

You may have to supply a password for your share, and you may have to supply an alternate user name to the CIFS service (other than the default 'root' user). By-the-way, this is the method that XenServer itself uses when you create an ISO CIFS Storage Repository in XenCenter.