Tired of paying hundreds of dollars for commercial file serversoftware? Looking for an application that lets you share *NIX andWindows files seamlessly across a network? Say hello to Samba, softwarethat's so cool, it'll make you want to kick up your heels and dance,dance, dance!
You can also make removable devices - for example, CD-ROM drives - on the server accessible as shares. Consider the following addition to "smb.conf", which exposes the device located at /mnt/cdrom as a Samba share:
[cdrom]
comment = CD-ROM drive
path = /mnt/cdrom
public = yes
writeable = no
In a similar manner, you can make other removable media
drives on the server - floppy, Zip, Jaz or DAT drives - accessible as shares, simply by first mounting the device and then sharing it through Samba. If you're an efficiency freak, you can simplify the process even further by installing the Berkeley automount daemon, which takes care of mounting and unmounting devices automatically.
And that's about it for the first part of this article. In the preceding pages, I took you through the process of compiling and installing Samba on your Linux server, demonstrating how simple and painless the process really is. I also illustrated some of the most common Samba usage scenarios, showing you how to create shares on the server for temporary, home and group usage.
In the second part of this article, I'll be focusing on the ancillary tools that ship with Samba, demonstrating how they can be used to mount SMB shares on other workstations, perform backups, and simplify common administrative tasks. Make sure you come back for that one...and, until next time, stay healthy!
Note: All examples in this article have been tested on Linux/i586 with Samba 2.2.5 and Windows 98. Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production environment. Melonfire provides no warranties or support for the source code described in this article. YMMV!
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