Brinkley Harrell wrote:
At 09:22 PM 12/17/2005, you wrote:
Brinkley Harrell wrote:
At 07:14 PM 12/17/2005, you wrote:
It seems that Samba does not access the file system on the attaching
client, whatever the filesystem (Samba being the server, not the
client). So yes, it does stand to reason that Samba doesn't care about
the client's filesystem.
You've kinda answered your own question here. Samba translates whatever
file system is presented on the server to a CIFS system to transport
over the net. If you let the user read and write, Samba handles the
host's file system for the guest client.
I suppose you could look at it that way. But from a programmer's point
of view (i.e. mine), the Samba server is not accessing the client's
filesystem. The client is accessing the server's filesystem (sort of).
That doesn't quite fully address my question regarding XP being able
to authenticate to an NT domain. See below.
It wasn't intended to answer the domain question that you never asked.
What you asked was if "Can XP Home authenticate to Samba?". And, in
fact, it does this quite well. Depending on your samba.conf, you may
read it with or without password. The machine does not have to be part
of any domain to do this.
It is the real question I was asking, but I guess I formed it
incompletely. The real question should have been "Can XP Home access a
Samba domain server?"
But your answer above reminded me of options. I knew that Samba doesn't
have to run as a domain server, but forgot - on my home LAN it is set up
as both an NT Domain and Wins server.
That may answer the Mac question, but I need some clarification. Can
the Mac read and write to a native NTFS filesystem running on a
Windows 2000, or XP Home system?
See above description on how Samba writes to a FS.
Samba CIFS != *Native* Windows NTFS (i.e. Windows NT/2000/2003 running
on NTFS).
The real answer, according to Gregory, is that OS X can read, but not
write (as with Linux) to NTFS (the *real* NTFS on a *real* M$ OS).
If XP Home authenticates to other XP boxes, it can authenticate to a
Samba share on a Linux box.
Windows XP Home can NOT access an NT domain server, regardless of the
Windows Server's filesystem. Micro$oft purposely crippled XP Home this
way; they expect that if you need to attach to an NT domain, you will
buy XP Pro.
Are you saying that XP Home *can* access a Samba server /acting as a
Windows NT domain server/? If so, then Samba is the obvious (and least
expensive) solution for this network.
1. Windows XP Home can access the Samba server.
That's now clear to me.
2. Samba server does not have to act as a DC.
This I knew, but had forgotten.
3. Samba can replace the PDC functions of NT.
I already knew this. The question has never really been about Samba vs.
NT other than if the limitations with XP Home was with XP-H itself, or
on the server side. That is, does XP-H prevent XP-H from accessing a
PDC, or does NT/W2K(3) prevent XP-H from accessing a PDC? If the problem
lies with XP Home, Samba does me no good.
4. Still won't help XP Home.
Because?
The bottom line here is, I would like to provide an easy way such that
all boxes on the existing network can share data - without replacing the
OS on exiting machines.
It looks like this is most easily possible by using Samba, because:
1) XP Home cannot connect to an NT domain server, and it does not
support more than five simultaneous connections on a Windows P2P
network. So NT/W2K(3) won't work.
2) OS X can't write to NTFS (so I can't use the existing Windows 2000
server in either peer or domain server capacities.
3) Neither (1) nor (2) apply to Samba.
So, to be clear:
Samba is a good solution because OS X has no problem with it, and XP
Home can access it (although I'm still not clear as to whether the
latter's true if I run Samba as a domain server).
--
Best Regards,
~DJA.
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