Rather, the problem appears to be with the network filesystem you're using, how you authenticate to it, and how that authentication is mapped to local users.

If you put a CIFS mount in /etc/fstab, it will be mounted by the local superuser (root), and the local superuser will control files on that remote mount. This is independent of the underlying filesystem. Usually, global write permissions for other local users are not turned on by default.

If you connect via gnome-VFS (or other GUI) as a regular user, that connection is made as your regular user, who then will control the files accessible through that connection.

You haven't been terribly forthcoming with details about what you're doing specifically, which makes it difficult to help remotely. If you are still interested in getting this working automatically behind the scenes, please follow up with things like:

• what specific line (or lines?) you tried in /etc/fstab
• examples of commands which didn't work: how did they actually behave? what did you expect/want them to do?
• who on your local machine you expect to be able to read and write the files on this remote filesystem.