[nzlug] samba: puzzled user...

[Nick Rout]

On Sun, March 9, 2008 9:53 pm, Simon Bridge wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 21:06 +1300, Cliff Pratt wrote:
>> Simon Bridge wrote:
>>  I ended up with 5 shares called "Public". OK -
>> > they ended up in a subdirectory of the computer hostname.
>> >
>> Yes, I wondered about that. Were you expecting a single folder called
>> "Public" will all machines sharing it?
> Nope.
>
>> Or replicating data between them?
> Nope.
>
> I have actually used samba back in my RH9/FC2,4 days ... but then it was
> between two or three hosts on a wired network. The boxes weren't going
> anywhere. I needed samba for the one windows box, but ended up finding
> ftp and nfs the easier option.
>
> Mostly it was the windows-side setup that was the painful one. But on
> the linux side I think I was using smbmount... I don't recall having a
> gui access like this.
>
> The way the ubuntu boxes just magically handled the shares made it look
> good for file-sharing between clients that don't stay put. But that
> means I need to understand it *conceptually* where the online howto
> focus on the functional... with cut-and-paste "solutions".

I suggest looking at the Chapter 7. Name Resolution and Browsing in "Using
Samba 2nd edn" - its part of your samba install if you have swat
installed. Go to your swat main page and its amongst the documentation.

name resolution and browsing are different but related concepts. Just
because you can resolve a windows machine name doesn't mean you can browse
it (ie see it in a "network neighbourhood" like way.)

Basically my advice on a small network is:

*set one machine (preferably an always on linux box) to be the master browser

* set all the other machines to use that as their wins server. For windows
client machines you can serve up the wins server info via dhcp.

* all machines then register their services with the wins server, and use
the wins server for browse and neame resolution

Its a while since I set this up so my details are necessarily a little vague.


But above all I recommend doing some reading to understand how smb and
cifs work, and how samba works in with smb/cifs.

nfs failed for me, can't remember why, but it did. I needed network mounts
so went to cifs and haven't looked back. I have three servers and two
clients with multimedia files (music and video) all joined up by cifs and
it works a treat. And unlike nfs doesn't hang forever if one of the
machines goes down. Theres not a windows machine amongst them, although if
my son boots windows he can access the files too.

PS I am not trying to start a flame fest about the pros and cons of nfs vs
cifs, just saying that the samba implementation of cifs is stable and
useful for me between linux and freebsd machines.

-- 
Nick Rout