I am running into quite a few of linux errors today.  thought I would document them.  first things first:

session setup failed: ERRDOS - ERRnoaccess (Access denied.)

and while debugging the prior error, i copied the relevant fstab entries to my laptop, and tried to run a mount -a there only to get this:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //remoteserver/share
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
(for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might
need a /sbin/mount.<type> helper program)
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail  or so

upon further inspection, i saw this after issuing a dmesg | tail:

...
[15497.773390] smbfs: mount_data version 1919251317 is not supported
[15497.773561] smbfs is deprecated and will be removed from the 2.6.27 kernel. Please migrate to cifs
[15497.773567] smbfs: mount_data version 1919251317 is not supported
[15566.406319] smbfs is deprecated and will be removed from the 2.6.27 kernel. Please migrate to cifs
[15566.406327] smbfs: mount_data version 1919251317 is not supported
[15689.005763] smbfs is deprecated and will be removed from the 2.6.27 kernel. Please migrate to cifs
[15689.005772] smbfs: mount_data version 1919251317 is not supported
[16137.544980] smbfs: mount_data version 1919251317 is not supported

so now, just trying to piece it all together.  stay tuned.

Update: The second issue was due to not having smbfs installed, since I normally do sshfs mounts for my personal use.  sudo apt-get install sshfs fixed this.

Update II: The first error was fixed when I changed the mount type to cifs in /etc/fstab. It use to be a sambe mount(smbfs) but then suddenly stopped working.  Now I am really curious why did it broke(a reference to a TM story I read recently)?