Re: [LUG] Samba - not the dance

[George Parker <georgeparker20@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 18/09/12 01:45, Jason Witcher wrote:

On 17 September 2012 18:22, Neil Winchurst <barnaby@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have been searching the web some more and it is obvious that Samba is

not what I need. So I have been looking at NFS, but it all seems over
complicated to me. Perhaps someone on the list could point to a simple
set up or perhaps I am asking too much.

I expected to find a simple way to set up a system whereby my daughter
could link to my computer from her laptop via the router connection
which we have already and then just look at the files in a particular
folder on my hard drive. Well, what do I know?

In my example I referred to some photos I had taken. They are on my
desktop because I can prepare them for her using the Gimp. She is not
interested in doing that for herself, so the images might as well be on
my hard drive from the start. It is obviously going to be simpler for
her to sit at the desktop and view the photos there.

When we had the chat about Samba I did not realise what was involved. I
should have known better. Sorry to have wasted people's time,

Neil

I agree with Jason, certainly not a waste of time. You can't know enough about sharing in my opinion.

The first thing to do is to decide exactly what it is you need to share.  Is it just within the house? Is it just a couple of machines occasionally? Is it a lot of machines?  Is it a complete share of /home or just a few files in a /Share directory? Do you need any files synchronised?  Do you share with Windows? Etc., etc.,...

I have at least 3 machines to share within the house and they all run Debian based distros.  I need to share the /home directories. I don't share Windows. I need to synchronise apps such as Gramps and Tellico as I work on them from different computers.

I set each computer on the router so that it boots onto the house network with a fixed internal I/P address.

I set up NFS on every computer pretty much as Gordon described.  The only problems I've had with NFS is when I had some disks formatted ext3 and some as ext4.  I now format all as ext4 and have no problems.

I have one computer as a sort of server as it is on all day and I have that mounted automatically at boot on the other machines. It appears on the desktop as "home_computer name" with the mounted disk symbol. I mount the others as required on the "server" under their own names.

I use Unison to synchronise data as and when required.

This works for me. I have to find a reasonable way to share photos with my 4 kids and other family who are scattered around the country but that is another story.  I am ashamed to say I have never used SSH in the 10 years I have been playing with Linux (which I still pronounce Lie-nux). And I only back up now and again to DVD. An I haven't any encryption installed. (Hangs head.)

But, hey, life's great ain't it?

George

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