samba automount for systems with vpn access to samba server

lets suppose your user id is 1000 and your home directory is /home/mike and we have a samba share on my.server.at.home which is only reachable internally in your home LAN or through a vpn connection which you have set up on your laptop. the share name is Data and you want to mount it to /home/mike/Data via cifs. since you are only sometimes connected to the vpn, it should automount as soon as you want to access it, which should succeed if you are connected to the VPN or to your local LAN.

in /etc/fstab add the following line:

//my.server.at.home/Data              /home/mike/Data cifs     credentials=/home/mike/.smbcred,username=mike,uid=1000,gid=1000,file_mode=0664,dir_mode=0775,noauto,users,nofail   0 0

and create a file /home/mike/.smbcred with your login credentials in the following format:

username=mike
domain=corp
password=totallySecretPassword

now change access permission to make sure only mike can read it:

chmod 600 /home/mike/.smbcred

it should probably suffice to reload your systemd config, if that does not work, try to reboot

systemctl daemon-reload

now whenever you are in your VPN or LAN you can just open /home/mike/Data and cifs will auto-mount