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Re: [LUG] Samba and Windows Network shares

 

On 18/09/12 00:11, Simon Waters wrote:
> On 17/09/12 18:36, paul sutton wrote:
>> Just a thought if someone could take this thread,  and copy / paste bits
>> together so its a sort of mini tutorial in such a way it makes sense
> I'd rather folks found the tutorials that already exist and picked the best.
>
> Although networking to Windows server for file share is usually pretty
> trivial in recent versions of most major distros, you find the network
> explore tool in the menu and it works pretty much like Windows Network
> Neighbourhood use to. When it isn't trivial it rapidly becomes a
> nightmarish complex mess as you open the box which is SMB (or whatever
> it is called this week) and look inside.
>
>
>

This thread has surprised me a little, I didn't think there was such a
thing as a linux user (outside of my mum, perhaps) that didn't
automatically know NFS/SSH...

"I'd rather folks found the tutorials that already exist and picked the best."

This is absolutely spot-on: there are a million tutorials all over the
net (plus the official documentation) on how to do all of these options.
Lowering the signal to noise ratio by creating another one is going to
provide nothing of value - reinventing the wheel and all that. Gordon's
quick howto earlier on NFS provides pretty much everything you need to
know for a quick and dirty setup although nobody has touched much on how
if you have more than a couple of machines on your LAN, you really
*must* use static IPs rather than DHCP, and you need either a common
hosts file (poor choice) or a DNS server of some/any flavour. Even my
friends' smartphones all have static IPs setup for when they're here so
they can fully use my network resources.

SMB/CIFS is a dead-end for linux, unless you must integrate with windows
boxes. Even so, setting up Samba is an absolute doddle unless you're
doing Samba 4 with AD integration, failover, replication, etc (trust me
on this). Using SMB over NFS for file transfers linux > linux is
retarded. If you do have to integrate with a windows environment, as I
definitely do, your windows side of things should really have a proper
AD server with a domain, and then everything is simple and easy again.
Only with simplistic home setups (no AD/domain, just a crappy workgroup)
does Samba get awkward - counter intuitive I know, but windows/linux
integration is really straight forward and painless these days. Check
out "net join" for all your usual SMB fun, and don't forget to sort out
your kerberos tickets first.

Anyway, back to the point - I can't even remember who the original
poster was but the answer to your issue is really, really simple,
requires virtually no setup and all the tools you need are already
installed, no matter what flavour of linux you're using. It's name is
SSH. Create a new folder (say /tank) on your personal machine, where you
keep all the stuff you want your daughter to access. Store all relevant
files in there, instead of on your desktop. Set permissions as
appropriate (I really hope I don't have to explain that as well - please
don't chmod -R 777 it). Even with firewalls (which make NFS painful to
properly administer) your port 22 should be open, if not, open it (don't
change the default port either, that's retarded). Make sure all your
machines are either on static IPs or sort your DHCP leases out to make
them effectively permanent.

Now, to access these files from another machine you just need the native
SSH tools. If you're using Gnome or Unity, "nautilus-connect-server"
from a terminal is probably quicker than flailing around and trying to
find the GUI launcher. KDE has KIO slaves but I don't like KDE very much
so maybe someone who does could chime in and let me know where the
quick-connect-to-ssh option is? Probably in Dolphin somewhere I'd
imagine. XFCE probably has similar options somewhere or you can just
install nautilus and use the tool from above (Thunar does mostly suck so
you probably want to do that anyway). Windows has WinSCP and hundreds of
other free tools for SSH mounting as does Mac (ExpanDrive,
MacFuse/SSHFS). If you're a bit more hardcore, just knock up a script to
setup the SSH mount(s) manually and drop it on your daughter's desktop,
she can just double click it when needed. Any of these options require
about 10 seconds to setup and configure and will give you an instant,
remote, secure window into the hosting system's files - your daughter
can happily click around in a GUI window and will never know she's not
seeing the files locally. Honestly, it doesn't get much easier than this.

Saying that, if you really want specific help, feel free to ask. Just
don't give up and fallback to some half-arsed bolted on rubbish like
using dropbox just to swap pics back and forth within the same house.

Regards



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