Accessing Windows drives ( on a networked pc) from a Linux box . Possible ?
 

HI there,
I have an XP box connected to a Linux box via crossover cable.
If I'm on my XP box there is no problem accessing the Linux box and downloading files. I can do this via Putty SSH and Pscp / Psftp. However, is the reverse possible ? I would like to access and copy files from my XP box ( both hard drives) onto my Linux machine, preferably using a terminal. I want to avoid any use of Samba shares as I have limited space on my linux HD. Would NFS be a viable option ? Alternative ideas would be kindly appreciated.
I'm running PCLOS 2007 on the linux machine.

Thanks again !!

Uncle-C

Well, over ssh (as in using PuTTY) it won't work unless you install a SSH server on Windows (which it doesn't have out of the box, like Linux operating systems usually do), and those are usually commercial things. If I'm right, it doesn't have a telnet server either (and in addition it would be unsafe; however if you're using just one cable between the machines = no routers nor connections to outside world, then it wouldn't be that big of a problem). So basically the only way I can think of to connect the two and be able to "see Windows drives from Linux" without buying and installing extra server software would be to use Samba shares (closest to a "native" solution, I don't see what the problem would be in that; you share a directory/directories in Windows and that's it?), or use something similar - "network drives". Haven't used NFS so can't say much about it, but I really think Samba would be the easiest/best solution here.

Thanks Bouncer. I was thinking about installing the OpenSSH server for Windows ( Cygwin) but thought there may be a more straightforward option. So would Samba on my Linux box allow me to access the whole of my C: and D: drives ( and not just specific directories) of my XP box under the "network drives" method ? I do not want to create a "samba share" on my linux box because of space limitations.

Regards,
Uncle

Hi..

Just an alternative, that might not be so good would be install and configure an ftp server in winbox.

What do you mean by "avoid any use of Samba shares as I have limited space on my linux HD"

If you want to easily access your windows box just install the samba client (not the server) and mount the windows box shares using smbfs. It won't take much space installing just samba client.

OpenSSH is also a very good solution. There is a package of OpenSSH for Windows which contains all cygwin module needed. You can then mount the Windows shares using sshfs so its very flexible to copy and paste file.