Today I was setting up a deployment with two hosts ;
- One in West Europe (“WE”)
- One in North Europe (“NE”)
The objective was to have a shared mountpoint between both. So I created a storage account in the region West Europe. In this storage account I created a file share, and mounted it on to the VM located in WE. Though when using the exact same config in NE, I got the following error message ;
mount error(13): Permission denied
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)
After double checking everything and fiddling with the keys, I concluded that this must have been a cross region issue. First I even (temp) opened up all NSG ACLs to ensure that no network traffic was blocking it.
The next step was to mount the file share from another host with WE. This worked… Then I tried from my own workstation (from “internet”), and this worked too… Next up was to deploy a Windows 2012 R2 in NE, and try to mount the share on there… That worked too!
So I was down to the situation that it was not region related, but that it was linked to my specific Ubuntu deployment. My system was using 14.04.4 LTS. Next up was to deploy an 15.10 in NE, and test it with that one… Also failed! Now I was pretty safe I could conclude that the issue was lying with the ubuntu/linux integration.
When digging a bit deeper, I came across several posts like this one ; http://serverfault.com/questions/726443/error-when-trying-to-mount-azure-file-storage-on-a-centos-7-machine
Note that since the Linux SMB client doesn’t support encryption yet, mounting from Linux still requires the client to be in the same Azure region as the file share. However, encryption support for Linux is on the roadmap of Linux developers responsible for SMB functionality from the community. Linux distributions that support encryption in the future will be able to mount Azure File Storage from anywhere as well.
So … **************. That was disappointing. Though at least we know where the cause of the issues for this.
Karim Vaes 