OCI: Troubleshooting and Resolving CIFS Mount After Exadata Upgrade

Applies To:

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
Exadata Compute Node running Oracle Linux 8 (Image 24.x)
CIFS/SMB Mount Scenarios

Symptoms:

After upgrading the Exadata image to version 24.x (Oracle Linux 8), attempts to mount a CIFS share from an SMB server fail with the following error:

mount: /x.x.x.x/ics_c/Images: mount(2) system call failed: No such file or directory.

The system did not prompt for a password, and all mount attempts failed regardless of the specified SMB version.

Cause:

The following root causes were identified:

The system was missing the cifs-utils package, meaning /sbin/mount.cifs was not available to handle CIFS mount operations. There was no network connectivity from the Exadata node to the SMB server all ICMP and TCP attempts failed, including port 445 (SMB) and 139 (NetBIOS).