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Category: BSD Help

Samba?

I have a LAN with a Win2k box and a freebsd box. If I want to be able to mount a drive on the W2K box on my FreeBSD box, would I use Samba for this, or is this only for making FreeBSD files/printers visible to Windows machines? If not, what approach is best to take?

Thanks.
Brett

Samba comes in two parts: the Samba server, so that Windows computers can mount Unix directories, and the Samba client, so that the Unix machine can access Windows file shares.

The Samba client (smbclient) is basically an ftp-style command-line interface. It doesn't really mount the Windows fileshare, to make it available as part of your Unix filesystem. It simply allows you to explore a Windows shared directory and download files locally.

If you really want to mount a Windows drive locally, you have a couple of choices:

1. Get an NFS server for Windows. This allows Windows to export a directory that appears to be a Unix network file share. Just do a search at Google for "NFS for Windows", and you will find several applications.

2. Get an application that allows your Unix box to actually mount the remote windows directory: Sharity Light (http://www.obdev.at/products/sharity-light/index.html) is an example. Read more here (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2000/07/12/FreeBSD_Basics.html). There is also a project to create full support for SMB file share mounting (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2000/07/13/Big_Scary_Daemons.html) directly in FreeBSD, but this is still in beta development.

>> There is also a project to create full support for SMB file share mounting directly in FreeBSD

Yes. But although smbfs is in a developing stage, it's far more stable than sharity-light. It's even more stable when running latest version of FreeBSD stable branch -> 4.4-STABLE because smbfs support has been added and integrated to the kernel.

Here is a real example:
I mount my E:\Warez share from Windows to FreeBSD using smbfs because I have 20GB of Warez on Windows and my FreeBSD box doesn't have to much disk space. I also serve those appz to my friends via Apache running on FreeBSD, so I just setup a vhost and Alias the entire /mnt/warez partition for my warez site. As far as resource and maintenance, I don't have to get a 20GB drive for FreeBSD and of course, I don't have to sync the drives from Windows to FreeBSD.

Cool. That is pretty much what I want to do -- share my original music, educational films of the adult variety, and no strings attached programs <cough> via ftp. Although, I have no need to set up a virtual host or alias it in bind because I am not serving via httpd. All of these files are on a large drive on my windows machine. I also want to be able send back ups of my FreeBSD machine to it (and a remote location eventually).

Thanks for the help, guys.

Brett

Originally posted by freebsd
>> There is also a project to create full support for SMB file share mounting directly in FreeBSD

Yes. But although smbfs is in a developing stage, it's far more stable than sharity-light. It's even more stable when running latest version of FreeBSD stable branch -> 4.4-STABLE because smbfs support has been added and integrated to the kernel.

Here is a real example:
I mount my E:\Warez share from Windows to FreeBSD using smbfs because I have 20GB of Warez on Windows and my FreeBSD box doesn't have to much disk space. I also serve those appz to my friends via Apache running on FreeBSD, so I just setup a vhost and Alias the entire /mnt/warez partition for my warez site. As far as resource and maintenance, I don't have to get a 20GB drive for FreeBSD and of course, I don't have to sync the drives from Windows to FreeBSD.

Oh, yeah... I forgot that when a FreeBSD project is in beta, that means its more stable than Microsoft's umpteenth service release of a full product ;).