[SWLUG] HELP for the terminally brain dead

[Justin Mitchell]

On Sat, 2005-03-12 at 15:10, Plod wrote:
> I have tried and tried to set the Linux box as a server and provide hard
> drive access to the windows PC for archiving etc, and to access the windows
> pcs from the Linux box.  But every how to I follow does not work.  Am I
> doing something wrong?  Probably!  Do I have a clue what it is?  NO!

seeing windows disks from linux is achieved using smbmount or smbclient,
i think you should also be able to see windows shares using nautilus
(the gnome file manager) or whatever the kde one is, in the 'Network'
section there should be a 'Windows Network' section showing any smb
shares it managed to find.  assumiung they are shared using tcp/ip not 
anything else strange, and that any firewalls you have dont block the
ports 137/138/139 i think it was.


> Maybe SAMBA doesn't run from the start?  Although I am sure that I said it
> should when I set the machine up.  Perhaps the firewall is blocking any
> accesses?  Err possible, but I have searched and searched in Mandrake and
> cannot find a way of controlling it.  I can find the on and off, I think,
> although nothing seems to change when I do it!

for serving disk space from the linux machine for the windows machines
to see, then yes samba is the most obvious way to do it.

to see if its running look in the output of 'ps aux' for smbd and nmbd,
those are the main daemon processes that samba runs.
the usual way to configure samba is by editing the /etc/smb.conf file,
but samba isnt the easiest thing to tweak as microsoft have changed
their protocol numerous times over tha ages, so you need to read the
documentation carefully to make sure you set it up correctly for the
type of windows your using.

if you just want to have one or two areas of disk space be accessible to
the windows machines, and not each users home directories, then you
could try using WebDAV. This is a feature of the apache webserver, its
not terribly hard to configure, and Should Just Work in windows where it
will appear as a 'web folder.