You want to know how to 'map' a network drive from a windows pc on your network to your linux box, right? That's my next step too. I have not got that far yet... so I'm interested in this answer as well.

i havent ever tried samba or having this m/c connect thro n/w to a win32 m/c.
if you cant write to it, and you have "setup" samba to write to that folder, then can't you add the group under which samba runs to the group that has write access to the /var/www dir on the linux m/c?

again, i have not used samba - just a trial.

cant you just make a symlink in /var/www or whatever is ur default apache setup to point to the folder on ur win32 machine across the network? can u do that with samba (i would think so)?

So Samba is the network 'gateway' you use? I suppose you could always set up an FTP server... I wonder if that would be easy. Again, I have not read anything on this yet so I am green.

By the way, thanks everyone for the help so far.

i know not much bout networking. but if u can view folders across the network on linux and win32 with samba, shouldnt it be fairly straightforward to make a link from linux pointing to a dir under win32?

and whatever work u want done on the linux m/c, well, can be done on it easily. i mean, i have apache running right now, and working fine. and most of the pages i put up are just links i created in the /var/www dir instead of writing/creating them there.

so, thats why i was askin bout doing the same with samba since u said u could see the files across the network.

well, as far as seeing files, yes, but when i try to write them to the folder i get something that says

cannot delete filename: access is denied.
Make sure the disk is not full or write protected...

=======

sounds like a samba problem to me.... what would the best way be to make it work easily, set up an ftp server, or figure this out?

well, what i was suggesting was not to create/edit files on the linux machine from win32 and vice-versa. but instead have a link pointing to the working directory across the network.

can u tell me how the mapping is done on samba? is it just like "shared folders" under windows? if ur win32 machine is called "win", and linux "lin" , and u have a dir under win called "webpages", can u make a link on ur linux machine to "/win/webpages"?

again, you know i havent used/seen samba in action, so this is kinda educational to me too.

what is linking. i am not familiar with it. is it similar to mounting a file system? i have not mounted a remote smb share in linux before without a gui... (i'm trying to build this baby all from afar using ssh)

well, it looks like i shall now find some more info and maybe change the document root directory to something else.... maybe then my windows box can write files to the linux box.

sorry bout the word 'linking". i only meant creating a symbolic link from ur default document root, to some working directory where u have some work. for instance, my doc root looks like:

r@trantor:~$: ls -l /var/www/
total 8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 r www-data 23 Sep 6 12:30 books -> /home/rajesh/ref/books/
-rwxrwsr-x 1 root root 4513 Apr 28 03:50 index.html

so i just have a link under doc root to whereever my "books" folder is so that i can view it by "http://trantor/books"

aha! i see now... just to try....

lemme know if it works

what would i type at the command prompt to make the symbolic link to a folder in my home directory?

/home/nkraft/html

is where i have my html docs uploaded to now! yay for ftp because it automatically works!

under ur document root, "ln -s /home/nkraft/html"

i tried the "ln -s /home/nkraft/html"
and then typed

"lynx 127.0.0.1/nkraft"

then i got an error message that said

"You don't have permission to access /nkraft/ on this server"

maybe that symbolic link didn't work....