Ubuntu 14.04 - How to connect to Apple's Time Capsule?

I have this in my living room. It's connected to my router and I connect to it (because it has greater WiFi range than my internet provider's crap of a router) to go to internet. The Time Capsule also has 2TB drive in it, so it's a nice storage location. There is Airport Utility that can be downloaded for Mac to connect to that storage and its settings. There is also an Airport Utility software for Windows that can do the same. For Linux (Ubuntu), there is no such software, at least not to my knowledge. There ARE ways to connect to it, but those methods work only for earlier Ubuntu distros.

Is there a way for me to connect to that Time Capsule's storage on Ubuntu 14.04?

Thank you very much.

2 Answers

Make sure you have mount.cifs

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

I had a hard time with this too until I hit on this

In short, I added this line to my /etc/fstab file

//10.0.1.1/Data /media/timecapsule cifs password=<timecap pw>,uid=1000,sec=ntlm,user 0 0

10.0.1.1 is your TC IP address. uid is your user id to set the permissions and user allows you to mount it without being root. Then from a terminal you can "mount /media/timecapsule" and it will work.

For Ubuntu 20.04, I don't believe the other methods work (Ubuntu 20.04 was released long after both the question and previous answer). I've tested this and it seems to work:

1. Install cifs-utils

This installs the necessary utilities to mount Common Internet File System (CIFS) volumes, like the Time Capsule.

sudo apt install cifs-utils

2. Create a mount point

This is where your Time Capsule volume will be mounted and appear in your filesystem

sudo mkdir -p /media/timecapsule

3. Mount the Time Capsule

This actually mounts the Time Capsule to the mount point.

sudo mount.cifs //TIME_CAPSULE_IP/TIME_CAPSULE_NAME /media/timecapsule -o sec=ntlm,vers=1.0,uid=$USER

In this command you should set:

• TIME_CAPSULE_IP to the IP address of your Time Capsule. If you're using it as your router this is likely to be 10.0.1.1, otherwise you can look in your router's settings for connected clients or use a network scanning tool like nmap to find this (e.g. nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24). If you get this wrong you are likely to get a long pause, then mount error(2): No such file or directory.
• TIME_CAPSULE_NAME to the name your Time Capsule's volume. This is likely either Data or of the form Joe Bloggs Time Capsule (using your name). You should escape spaces with backslash e.g. //Joe\ Bloggs\ Time\ Capsule/Data. This name may also be discovered in file browsers like Nautilius in 'Other locations'. If you get this wrong you are likely to quickly get mount error(2): No such file or directory.

Older instructions will omit the important vers=1.0 parameter here (as this used to be the default). Without this you are likely to get one of these errors depending on your OS version, TC version and TC firmware version:

• Unable to access location
• Got error "kFPAuthContinue" from server
• Could not connect to Time-Capsule-Name.local: No route to host
• Failed to retrieve share list from server: No route to host
• mount error(2): No such file or directory

Similarly, without the sec=ntlm option newer versions default to the ntlmssp security mode. Without this you are likely to get the error:

• mount error(13): Permission denied

If you have already mounted the volume, you are likely to get the error:

• mount error(16): Device or resource busy

Without the uid=$USER the volume will be mounted so only the root user can modify files. Trying to edit files will likely result in permissions errors.

If you struggle to login, it's likely your password is wrong. This will result in the mount error(13): Permission denied message. On usernames, generally Time Capsules don't seem to verify them whatsoever and anything can be used for it. However, you can try changing the user with the user=Joe option.

4. Browse files on your mounted volume

You should now be able to browse around /media/timecapsule and see and edit your files

5. Unmount the Time Capsule and remove the directory

To close the connection and cleanup the /media folder, you can run:

sudo umount /media/timecapsule
sudo rmdir /media/timecapsule