Can anybody explain to me (and perhaps some others too) why one would use Samba and not mount VFAT drives in Linux?
If there are more Win machines in a net than Linuxes, does that affect decision? Say you have a RH box that is available to some Win boxes, do you ned Samba to make the Win boxes see the Linux disk(s)? What about the other way? If you want to show to the Linux box drives C and D of PC#1, what would the steps be?

Samba is used to mount and serve NETWORKED shares (compatible to windows network shares).

mount VFAT drives is a LOCAL mounting of hard drives of a different partition type

I jogged thru a number of Samba/Networking related threads in another discussion group and it seems like it is not that difficult to set samba up. Let's ignore the physical side for now and assume I have a machine called PC1 and PC2 running Wk2. They have drives C, D and E. What commands would I need to stick into etc/fstab to get these mounted? The /mountpoint always puzzles me, would I do a MKDIR /MNT/PC1 and then connect the SAMBA thing to this using //PC1/C /MNT/PC1 or what? What about the other way around, from PC1 to LINUXPC? What is needed at that end?

you've pretty much got it. if you have a directory shared in w2k, and the access permissions are set properly, do this:

mkdir /mnt/whatever
smbmount //PC1/share1/ /mnt/whatever

this assumes that you do not need a password and that you have already created the /mnt/whatever directory. do a 'man smbmount' to get more options

to got the linux box to 'share' your directories, you need to run the samba server (smb) and configure it. read the howto: http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/SMB-HOWTO.html

You DO NOT need Samba to mount a physical drive, regardless if it is VFAT, FAT, NTFS, or whatever. If you have a drive in your machine that has Windows on it, all you do is mount the drive

mount -t auto /dev/hdc1 /mnt/windows <--- or whatever you want to call it

Samba is only used for network shares.. it has nothing to do with mounting those local drives. In the case above, that would only work for networked PCs...

Samba is really good Windows Networking Server Software. If you want to do what you have posted you should use it.

I had A RedHat 7.2 Samba server setup on the boat for about 15 users. It worked great.

The file permissions are pretty much setup the way most people would use them.

you should probably use swat to configure it.

I mount my windows shares with mount like this


mount -t smbfs //win2k/pub /lan/win2k -o username=david,password=passwd


plenty of info on the forum if you have trouble.



One thing to note here,

Local mounts depend on filesystem support

with network mounts filesystem types don't matter with file sharing.

I believe there is a problem with nfs and local vfat drives.