I have seen issues close to my problem but no one seems to have a definitive answer as to what is going on and why the failure occurs. I have a number of NAS devices on my home network and on a previous install of 12.04 and version prior mounting at login worked using this entry for each in fstab:

//servername/sharename /media/windowsshare cifs    guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8,codepage=cp850,cp850 0 0

Now when I use this, 12.10 reports the standard - cannot mount bad option ... blah blah...

The kern log reports that the CIFS option "codepage" unknown... changed entry to "unicode" and received the same error message. There are no other error messages or log entries that would indicate another issue, but this is the statement I used for quite awhile with version 12.04 and before.

Is the codepage option obsolete in 12.10/CIFS now? Is there a codepage support program that I must load? Is there some kind of helper program that is required to supports the codepage option?

A current review of the man pages at samba.org does not make mention of the option "codepage".

Extremely confused - any help/insight would be greatly appreciated.