Samba on Fedora Core 1 - Part 3: Using Samba

A brief description of how to access Samba share from different clients are given below. This is by no means exhaustive and if you want detailed explanation, you can refer to various articles available on this subject.

Windows 98
Windows 98 has built-in support for TCP/IP. But this is not installed as the default. To add TCP/IP, go to `Control Panel' --> `System' and choose `Add' --> `Protocols' --> `TCP/IP from Microsoft'. Be sure to enter your network address and network mask correctly. Reboot your windows 98 machine and the Samba share will be available in the Network Neighborhood. To use a printer on the samba server, you should install the printer driver from the corresponding Windows version

Windows 2000/XP
To map a drive using the Windows GUI, click on My Computer. On the toolbar options, select Map Network Drive (under Windows XP this option is under the Tools menu). Once selected, a new box will open up. In the Drive box, click a drive letter that you wish to use. In the Folder box, type the path for the server and path that you wish to connect to and click finish.

Alternately, you can use the following command from the command line

NET USE G: \\Machinename\tmp /YES

This will map the /tmp folder of your Fedora box to G drive.

Mac OS X
Make sure that SMB support is enabled in Directory Access Utility under Applications/Utilities. Activate Finder, select Go and then Connect to Server. In the server address field, type in the server address in one of the following formats.

smb://ServerName/ShareName/
smb://WORKGROUP@ServerName/ShareName
smb://WORKGROUP;User@ServerName/ShareName

Server address can be IP address or any valid DNS name. Please note that you will be unable to connect to any server that has a share name containing a hyphen or space in it. For spaces, you can try substituting a %20 in its place. After clicking Connect, you may be prompted for Authentication.

Linux If you are planning to install Samba in your Fedora box only, you can skip this section. But if you are going to mount Samba shares from any other linux box, you may continue reading.

Make sure that SAMBA_FS is compiled into your Kernel. If not, you will get the error message mount: fs type smbfs not supported by kernel when you try to mount the Samba share. If you get this message, recompile the kernel with SAMBA_FS. Now Samba must be installed in both the machines even if you are going to access Samba shares from only one machine. On your second machine, configure Samba with the --with-smbmount parameter. Using this option automatically creates the smbmount and smbumount commands along with the file /sbin/mount.smbfs (which is actually just a soft link to smbmount).

Now you can mount the Samba share from your Fedora box by

[root@machinename samba]# mount -t smbfs -o username=myusername,password=mypass //192.168.1.9/pub /mnt/sambamachinename

Now you can access Samba shares from another linux machine.

This ends our discussion on how to install, configure and use Samba on a Fedora box. If you want a detailed version of this article in PDF format, please send me an email. Please send me your comments/criticism/suggestion by email.