> Hi David,

Hi! 8-)

> I assume you know something about Samba.

> I want my Linux to see a folder on one of our Windows servers.
> Is this easy, is Samba the right way to do this ?

Yes, it's fairly easy, and Samba is the right way (in fact, without the
MS Unix Toolkit, it's the only way to do it).

How depends on what version of Windows you're running, and whether you
need to update the files as well as just read them (ie, do you care
about user mapping?).

As others have mentioned, mount -t smb is the method to get the Windows
directory mounted in your environment. You should make sure the Windows
servers can support FQDNs (ie, Win2K or later) and are in the DNS, or
that you have a WINS server configured somewhere in the environment and
both Windows client and server are registering with it (so you can
translate the Windows share names to IP addresses for Samba to use).

If this is a domain environment, you may need to create a machine
account for the Linux system to authenticate to the domain, and thus be
able to see the various shared directories (it's not absolutely
required, but I'd recommend looking into it so that you don't end up
with a lot of unauthenticated accesses).

Once that's done, then you treat the Windows share just like any other
remote file system, eg you create a mount point and mount the remote
directory on it. Example (I use /net/<servername> as the basis for my
remote file systems as a habit; no requirement for this name):

Su to root and do:

mkdir /net/va1pdc/books
mkdir /net/va1exch/scratch
mkdir /net/va1exch/scratch2

mount -t smb \\va1pdc\books    /net/va1pdc/books
mount -t smb \\va1exch\scratch /net/va1exch/scratch
mount -t smb \\va1exch\scr2    /net/va1exch/scratch2

You get the idea.

The Oreilly book on Samba has a couple chapters on this topic, and the
book "Running Samba" also has a good explanation of this topic.

-- db

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