mounting nt from unix

[Buchan Milne]

Nelson Garcia wrote:
> 
> Forgive me if I'm not addressing your question correctly. Do you want to
> mount a SMB share? or do you want to be able to "browse" what shares the NT
> machine is offering?
> 
> Although I run Linux/Samba as a PDC on my LAN, I have never had to mount a
> SMB share on the Linux box. If you just want to mount, can't you just use
> "smbmount"? http://us1.samba.org/samba/ftp/docs/htmldocs/smbmount.8.html

You will note from the document you refer to that smbmount (or actually
the smbfs filesystem ) is only available for linux (if I'm not mistaken
- thing might have changed recently). Thus this would not work on a
solaris box.

> There is also a gui tool called "gnomba" that came with my Mandrake distro,
> however, I havent' gotten much success using it.

Gnomba is the most pathetic smb browser I have seen. I would rather take
my chances with smbclient (where I don't need to knwo the range of ip
addresses I want to browse)! You might want to try:
-LinNeighborhood, which browses much better, and allows you to mount
shares (linux only of course)
-kruiser (aka KDE Explorer) which allows you to browse inside shares. I
am not sure if it actually mounts the share under some part of the local
filesystem and virtualises it, or if it uses an smbclient type
interface. The latter would of course be preferable, in light of
compatability with other unices.
 
> For an off topic answer, could'nt you setup NFS on the NT machine? My trial
> version of X-WinPro came with a free NFS server that I've kept ever since (I
> use X-Win32 now to run my Linuxbox from my NT machine).

It might be a better option to set up a linux box to mount the smb
shares and export them via NFS.

This actually brings up my pet peeve - there are no decent smb browsers
available. kruiser is the only file manager I have seen which allows you
to browse smb shares without mounting them explicitly first. I guess
Konqueror is meant to do this also, but it makes some _VERY_ bad
assumptions about your network. I have never managed to get Konqueror to
accept my smb password, because it insists on using the hostname as the
netbios name. At home I haven't bothered with hostnames (ip's work fine
for me) and at work our hostname is controlled by another organisation
=> hostname!=netbios name.

Is anyone on the samba team actaully coordinating the efforts of people
working on this kind of thing ? Maybe we will have to wait for someone
to write a plugin for Nautilus.

Buchan