Hi,

I have used Linux on and off over the past 15 years. Linux has been the solution to a lot of my networking problems over the years. I work in a school and I am keen to setup Linux labs for the students. Users can logon with their active directory [Micoroft accounts] and can access their files off server drives. All this is made easy with the help of CentrifyDC. I can simply access a network share and CentrifyDC handles the authentication.

My issue is that some applications will see mounted samba shares and some applications won't. For example I can open and save files to my Windows servers using applications such as Openoffice, Gnumeric, Abiword. However apps like DIA will only show local drives. Maybe some applications use the default file manager where the mounts are bookmarked whilst other use their own file manager?

Does anyone know a way around this?

Mount the shares at fixed locations in the filesystem ? .. as this is at the filesystem level it would be supported by all applications, you could also use autofs for the home directories

/shared -> 1.2.3.4:/shared
/home/<user> -> 1.2.3.4:/home/<user>

Hi KBP.

Thanks for the prompt reply. Are you saying that the /home/user folder can actually be a network location as well?

I don't think the mount command is my solution. Granted it mounts the network location locally but I need to manually specify a username and password for the mount. I work in a school and we can have 1300 users on each machine, it really needs to be automated.

A user logs on and they get two network drives 1) Their personal home drive based on a windows server and 2) a network share also on a windows server

G.

It turns out that pcmanfm is automounting the files locally for me in a hidden folder called .gvfs under each users home folder.

Now all I need is a bookmark to the local folder /home/$USER/.gvfs

Ok I have taken an easier approach
Create a file called logon.sh in /etc/profile.d and make it executable with the following in it
echo smb://server/share “N_Drive” >> /home/$USER/.gtk-bookmarks
echo smb://server/$USER$ “P_Drive” >> /home/$USER/.gtk-bookmarks
echo file:///home/$USER/.gvfs "Network Drives" >> /home/$USER/.gtk-bookmarks

So in Nautilus or PCMANFM there are bookmarks for my P or N drive. Now some applications can see server shares and others can't. You can access the server shares from the dud applications by accessing the bookmark "Network Drives" which points to the local location ie the hidden .gvfs folder under each users home folder.
Works a treat