OK I am using Suse 8.1 Personal. My current LAN setup is currently just 2 comps. one linux and the other Win XP Pro. XP has been setup already to be the server, back before I even had linux. So, what I am trying to do is just add this linux box to the LAN. I can already use the internet shared by the XP comp. But how do I veiw the shares of the windows comp? and how do i add shares on the linux comp, so I can access them from windows? Can this be done with just the Samba client? (damn personal, should have gotton pro.) And since I have the personal version I only have the client... If I do need the Samba server would it be possible to download it and install it to Suse?

I'm not familiar with Suse, so I don't know exactly how they package things, but if you have the Samba client package installed you should have smbmount - probably in /usr/bin. This package will allow you to mount Win shares on your Linux box. I assume you already know how to set up the shares on the Windows side. In Linux:

# mkdir /mnt/winshare
# mount -t smbfs //WINHOST/WINSHARE /mnt/winshare

where WINHOST is the hostname of the Win box and WINSHARE is it's share, as configured on the windows side.

You'll probably have to have an entry in /etc/hosts to map WINHOST to it's IP address, or you could just use the IP address in the mount command for starters - to separate name resolution issues from mounting issues.

Once all this works to your satisfaction, you can add an entry to /etc/fstab to mount this at boot time.

To go the other direction - share Linux directories with Windows - you'll need the Samba server package. Here's a link to a binary rpm: http://hostopia.samba.org/samba/ftp/...SuSE/i386/8.2/

Actually this is a directory with various packages. Once you have Samba installed look at it's config file - usually /etc/samba/smb.conf. It's very well documented and for what you want to do there are commented samples.

okay, i got it to work.. could you explain the format of fstab? and what should i add to it? Thanks.

# man 5 fstab
# man 8 mount

Using the previous example, your fstab entry could look like this (must all be on one line):

//WINHOST/WINSHARE /mnt/winshare smbfs defaults 0 0

Basically:
- device or in this case remote share
- local mount point
- fs type
- mounting options

I added that to the fstab, but it wont mount at boot up.
Here is what my fstab says:

/dev/hde7 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hde5 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hde1 /windows/C ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hde6 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0
//matt-1/F /mnt/winshare/F smbfs defaults 0 0

It wont let me post it with the long spaces.. but I think yall get the idea.

Sorry, someone else needs to jump in here. I don't know the Suse init script layout - I use slack and rh.

Somewhere buried in the init scripts should be the mount commands. You could do something like:

# grep -l mount `find /etc/rc.d`

and poke through the listed files looking for where mounting is and isn't done.