Mapping a drive to a Samba server
 

Hi all,
I maintain a Samba server on RedHat 9 with clients are windows work systems.(recenty joined the job,never worked on Samba before). I need to have a directory(drive) on my server such that all my clients can acess it.I figured out the directory on my server where the user mapped drives are present.I created a new sub directory in that but to make it available to my clients to map it I came to know that I need To make "Samba" point to that directory.I came to know that I need to modify "smb.conf" to do that.Can somebody suggest me how can I make "Samba" point to the new drive so that I can map the drive on my client machines.

Example:
A,B,C,D are my clients.S is the server
In the "home" directory on S there are 4 sub directoies A,B,C,D which are mapped to 'U' drive on respective clients. So when a client 'A' accesses its 'U' drive it accesses 'A' directory in "home" on the server.Now I need to have a directory "common" in "home" of my server so that I can map it to a drive on each of the clients.Let the drive be "Y".So if each of the clients goes to the network drive "Y" they should access the "common" directory on my server.

Can somebody help me figure out how to do that.

Samba is not easy. To help you get your feet wet, install SWAT. It is a web based configuration editor for samba. You can choose a myriad of others as well here: http://us2.samba.org/samba/GUI/ . All of the publishing of drive questions that you posed are in the documentation there. That is a place to start until you hit a snag.

Below is a basic share. Append this to the bottom of your smb.conf file or just below the [homes] section. Change the @admin to whatever your admins group is. You'll need to at least set owner and group permissions on the unix files systems. You can change [share] to whatever you'd like to share the path as.

[share]
comment = Shared files
path = /var/data
admin users = @admin
read only = No
create mask = 0775
directory mask = 0775
browseable = no

After you add this, edit your login script to map whatever drive you'd like to \\sambaserver\share