Ok, This was a rather silly mistake on my part.

As it turned out I was using a kernel stripped of (amongst many other 
things) samba support. I just accidentally found out because I was 
wondering why cd devices were missing from the dmesg.

Sorry for the noise.

regards, Theo

theo borm wrote:
> I get the following error:
> 
> mount_smbfs: mount error for /home/theo/shmnt: Operation not supported 
> by device
>