Successfully mounting Drobo shares from a Chromebook with Crouton w/ Ubuntu 14.04 installed
The last couple weeks I've switched my working environment from a MacBook Pro to a Chromebook that has Ubuntu installed under Crouton. A lot of my work is developing Node.js software, and writing website content, and my habits are to live at the command line typing commands. But it also means accessing the large amount of content I have stashed on the MacBook Pro, and a Drobo 5N. MacOSX can easily mount shares on the Drobo, letting me access those files as if they were on the local machine. By default Chromebooks cannot do this, meaning the Chrome browser side of my Chromebook cannot (at this time) access anything stored on the Drobo. Because Ubuntu is installed (via Crouton), that side of the Chromebook theoretically can mount shares on the Drobo, but I ran into problems trying to directly mount the SMB share using Ubuntu 14.04 tools. Fortunately I've developed an alternate method that's nearly as good and quite easy to implement.