Abstract
File sharing between various machines has been
available for a long time on UNIX systems. The new
facilities brought by recent tools make this feature easily
available for all users. Sharing data between two users on two
different machines is made in three simple
steps:
Admin authorizes sharing: the section called “Partition Sharing: Allow Users to Share Directories”.
Users share directories: see the section called “File Sharing”.
Users browse remotely shared directories: see the section called “File Sharing”.
This tool allows the system administrator to import remote shared directories on the local machine. This tool affects shares based on the SMB protocol, used mainly by windows OSs.
While users can individually access remote shares through their file managers, it may be interesting in some cases to import a specific share for it to become available at once for all users. We will go through an example showing how to import a template directory from a Windows machine.
When you click on the Search servers button (Figure 17.8), the local network is scanned and all machines that currently share directories (including the local one) are shown. In our example, only one server is available, server. It is the machine that contains the templates we want to make available locally for all users.
Clicking on a machine's name will try to connect to it and browse available shares. If those shares are password protected, a dialog pops up asking for your authentication on that machine.
Enter the correct Username, Password and Domain. The available shares on that machine will then appear. Click on the little arrow on the left of the server icon to show available shares.
Once a share is selected, a button appears. Clicking on it displays a dialog where you can type the local directory where remote files will be accessible.
Once this is done, two more buttons appear:
Mount. Will actually make the resource available locally. When this is done, users simply have to point their file manager to /mnt/TEMPLATES to get the templates hosted on machine server.
. These are advanced options about sharing which we won't discuss here.
Also, the little icon in front of the
shared directory becomes
When you have finished configuring the access points for remote directories, click the button. A dialog box will appear asking whether you wish to save your configuration or not. Click to make the shares always accessible. Click to exit without saving your changes.