Central file server in home environmant
 

I am very new to the Linux world, despite my rather strong background with computers **blush** I have not had too much exposure to Linux. Being overly gung-ho about the learn-by-doing method I have decided to jump in head first with a project that I have been plotting for some time now.

I already have 3-4 computers set up in my apartment and can anticipate a few more down the road for when I get a house. I would REALLY like to set up a central fileserver on my network that can hold common files that I might want to access from any computer (such as my music archive, movies, programs, etc.) My big reason for doing this is my vision of a setting up a barebones, remote controled Media Center computer hooked onto my entertainment center that can essentially be tamper-free.

I have actually successfully set up and configured Samba to the best of my ability to be able to serve files to my computers. The problem that I have run into is that I would like to be able to "Map a network drive" on all my other Windoze computers without having to enter or validate a password each time the computer is rebooted (tamper-free approach). Currently I have not figured out a command for getting around this in either the Ubuntu User Accounts setup, smb.conf commands, or on the Windows side.

So long question short:
Is there a way that I can map a network drive from any of my other computers in such a way that I will never need to enter a password?

Supplimental questions include:
- Is Ubuntu a good distro to be attempting this with? (I used it because many people said it was the easiest to install)

- Is there a better app/approach for this other than Samba or Ubuntu?

I understand that this may have been answered in the past but I was having no luck digging around with search terms. Any links, tutorials, or advice you have for me will be greatly appreciated as I have totally hit a wall while digging around on Google and the documentation files. :confused:

If it will be helpful in troubleshooting, I can also post a copy of my smb.conf file.

Edit: Fixed terrible sentence structure that I totally missed during proofing.

If you are using Samba to emulate a Windows NT PDC, you can do it through login scripts when the users first logon to Windows. If you are using a workgroup instead, you can have a script on the Windows machine that runs at login. Just put a link to the script in the StartUp program group. As it turns out, I have written a script that will map a network drive on Windows by allowing you to keep the username and password in a file. You can find it in the Microsoft Community-Submitted Script Center:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scr.../cscds022.mspx

Cheers.

Awesome! I can't wait to give this a try. Thanks a ton. :)