Connecting to Windows drives from LINUX
 

This is my first post to this group.
In our office all the file servers are Windows Server 2003. I need to connect to one of these drives from a LIUNX RH4 computer, which is on the domain. Please offer advice on how I can access these drives.
thanks, Fabrizio Zanella

Hello Fabrizio,

Your best shot is at using samba.

When you say RH4 you really mean RHEL4 right?

I think RHEL4 has a utility called
that will help you get it done using a GUI.

Samba is a suite of Windows networking packages that allows Linux to participate in a Windows network (as a "client"), and/or to share its own printer and/or disk resources with such a network. It even allows Linux systems to act as domain-controllers.

I cordially suggest that you begin by following this link so that you can better understand what Samba can do for you.

Chances are, Samba is already installed on your system. It's free, of course...

What you appear to want to do is to mount a Windows network share so it is available on your Linux system. You will need the samba package for the cifs mount.

One of the easiest methods is to install autofs then edit (as root) /etc/auto.master to uncomment the smb line. If the windows shares are protected, you can create a credentials file with three lines: "username=user name", "password=password", and "domain=workgroup domain" (substitude appropriately) - if you name it /etc/auto.smb.hostname (hostname is the name of the computer with the shares), then the autofs system will use it as is. Do all this and you can 'ls /smb/hostname' to see the shares. (as always, restart the service after changing the config files)

Or, you can create a mount point and then run the command (as root)

or you can do the equivalent in /etc/fstab

the noperm, nounix, and such truck are for the case you have trouble with permissions and timestamps and other wierdness. sometimes they help/

Connecting to Windows drives from LINUX
 

Thank you everyone for the helpful comments. I downloaded Samba 3.3.2 from the samba.org site and unzipped the .tar.gz file. Now I cannot determine how to install this tool. I copied the samba files to the /usr directory. What command can I run to install the samba tool? I see information on configuring it.

See the O'Reilly (publisher) Samba book on http://oreilly.com/catalog/samba/chapter/book/. It freely available, o price can't be a matter. I have found it sufficient to set up samba in office environments.

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