Ok, I think I discovered an issue. It may be a "feature" but this is what has bitten me now. After making the above fixes with the proper paths, it still wasn't working. When I do an smbclient query, it gave me all the details indicating the share is there and available. however, autofs was still failing. When I tried a manual mount on the client, I would get: $ mount -t cifs //bigrip/trex /mnt/trex -o user=guest Retrying with upper case share name mount error(6): No such device or address Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs) And on the server side I see this: CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -6 On a hunch, I decided to make a small change on the server side. The samba configuration is set up with a server name and several aliases for the various shares, so the staff here can go to \\<server-name>\<path> and \\<server-alias>\<path> and have different access control, different files, and all that fun, but it's all on the same physical machine. The path I was trying to mount is on one of those aliases. So I made that change on the server, exporting the share on the real server name and now suddenly it's working. I can mount it with no problems, and autofs is working. When I switched it back to using the server alias, it fails. Interestingly, the Windows clients mounting this share, using the server alias, are working just fine. But for some reason that does not work when I try it from a CentOS machine.