Sharing files among various machines have 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 among two users on two different machines is made in three simple steps:
Admin authorizes sharing: Allow Users to Share Directories.
Users share directories: File Sharing or Sharing Files.
Users browse remotely shared directories: File Sharing or Sharing Files.
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 16-35), the local network is scanned and all machines that might share directories (including the local one) are shown. In our example, test is our local machine, server is the machine that holds the templates we want to make available locally for all users.
Clicking on a machine's name displays the available directories on it.
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:
. 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.