pretty much yes, a seperate folder for each on the suse box.

even though you are sharing the whole drive (which is fine, no need to change this) it still has a name of some sort (i can't check exactly what coz I don't have win xp (or windows at all for that matter) and I am telling you all this from memory (i have used XP only once and have never shared a folder on it so I am not sure of the exact syntax, I do however know that it must have a share name, so have a look it must be there somewhere).

ok before you get to fstab just try to use mount to connect. The exact parameters can be a little tricky to get right so make llife easy for yourself, once you can connect with smbclient you will know what you need in terms of options for mount, then once you have mounted the drive with mount you can tranfer those options over to fstab

yes, basically your fstab entry will look something like this

[/i]/etc/fstab[/i]
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat defaults 0 0
//downstairs/d /mnt/mainframe/d smbfs username=charles,password= 0 0

NOTE: you may not need the username and password bit, I just put it in there as an example in case you do need it.

so this would mount hda1 into the /mnt/windows dir and mount the share called d on the machine called downstairs into /mnt/mainframe/d

ok, so what do i need to put in the terminal to mount it there first?

the name of the "D" drive is "MUSIC" btw.

usually i would just do this:

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/mainframe/windows
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/mainframe/d

but how will it know to look at the other computer and not this one?

mount -t smbfs -o username,password //downstairs/music /mnt/mainframe/music

as mentioned earlier you may be able to leave out the username and password

ok, i will try that.
I figured some stuff... as usual it was FAR easier than it seemed.

I changed the name of the folders to make more sense.
here is how I mounted the shared folders...

smbmount //mainframe/movies /mnt/mainframe/movies
smbmount //mainframe/music /mnt/mainframe/music

when i put those in as commands in the terminal, it doesn't ask me for a username and when it says password: - I just press enter and it works.

so now I need to figure out how to add it to my fstab, going by what you said, it should be..

mount -t smbfs -o //mainframe/music /mnt/mainframe/music
mount -t smbfs -o //mainframe/movies /mnt/mainframe/movies

is that right? remember it doesn't ask me for a username but i can add one if i want and there is no password since i just press enter.

something like this should do the trick

/etc/fstab
... existing commands ...

//mainframe/movies /mnt/mainframe/movies smbfs 0 0
//mainframe/music /mnt/mainframe/music smbfs 0 0

i don't need to put in a username or password?
just making sure
thanks for all your input btw.

also, this might be stupid, but i noticed that i could not mount those same folders today (although I didn't troubleshoot too much either)
but, do I need to be in windass on my downstairs machine to see them upstairs?
is there anything I need to do or can I just turn on my comp and boot into rh and be able to mount them in suse upstairs?

shouldn't need username or password, try it without and if it doesn't work then try it with ;-)

no probs for the help. that is what I am here for!

for the moment get it working with the downstairs macihne in windows, once you have that sussed then try to do the same for linux, the linux part is more difficult, you have two choices for that, either use nfs on the mounted paretitions - easy-ish to setup but permissions can be a bugger, or use samba to share those directories so the config on the macihne upstairs does not need to change

hi
If u share a folder on your windows whatever it is, u'll see it on the network places when u click on the pcname. So if downstairs is pcname and music is a share on it I THINK u must do:
$smbclient //downstairs/music
or
$mount -t smbfs -o ro //downstairs/music /mnt/yourdir
Let me tell you that it could not be exact, in nfs is pcname:dir. And another thing: for resolving the name of the pc you must add an entry in /etc/hosts (like root), the new line would be:
ip_address remotepcname.domainname remotepcname
or more basic:
ip_address downstairs
Give it a try.

Sorry I did not read the page 2.
You just were told the right way.

no worries on that.

I'd just like to add that when looking at or using information on my windows box from my suse box, that the windows box must be on and in windows, otherwise the shred information is not accessible.

I was hoping I could access it without having to be in windows.

I'm not quite sure where you're at on Samba but skimming the posts I can tell yu you'd probably want one full time Linux box as the Samba server and Samba client installed on your other Linux boxes.

I don't know if this is gonna work, but u could mount the windows partition on a dir in you linux partition who dual boots on the same machine. Then try to share it with samba.
I have not done this before cos I got almost everything of my stuff on linux boxes but one day try to burn a cd with some mp3 from a ntfs partition mounted in a linux dir and I could not do it. I have to copy them to linux partition and say bye to Bill G*tes! (or goto hell).

viva linux

mounting samba shares on boot:
http://www.justlinux.com/nhf/Filesys...rom_Linux.html

you can it is just a bit trickier than doing it directly from windows.

As I mentioned in the last post you can either mount the windows partition on your RH8 box and then export this new mount with NFS (permissions can be tricky when doing this), or you could setup the server part of samba (so far we have only looked at th client side) and use that to export the dirve as if your linux box was in fact a windows machine. The advantage of doing this is that the suse box does not need to change it confguration, in both cases it is looking at an windows share.

It would, however, be much easier to set up a central file store on the suse box that all other machine could access. You could easily run samba on this pc and create shares that the windows boxes could see and using either samba or NFS share the same directories to the linux boxes.

This is what I do at home, one pc always on large hard drives, samba for the windows pc's and NFS for the unix pc's. It is easy to administer, no permission problems, secure and scalable. It's all good ;-)