Mounting a workgroup or machine

[catlee at canada.com]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2000 at 12:48:51AM -0500, Peter Samuelson wrote:
> 
> [catlee at canada.com]
> > Is it possible to allocate a portion of your file system to act like
> > Network Neighbourhood on Windows?  For example, I'd like to mount my
> > work group on /mnt/samba so that I can access files by going to
> > /mnt/samba/<host>/<share>/foo/bar.txt
> 
> What you want *might* be possible, if you can find the winning
> combination of autofs and smbfs.  I don't have much experience with
> autofs, however, so that's all I can tell you.

Hmmm...Ok, I've got something sort of working.  I've got autofs set up to
mount //HOST/SHARE to /misc/HOST-SHARE, and then I symlink /mnt/samba/HOST/SHARE to /misc/HOST-SHARE.  The reason for this is that I can't figure out how to
get autofs to mount on any place below /misc (I can't say mount //HOST/SHARE to /misc/HOST/SHARE).

The symlink thing isn't such a big deal.  My problem right now is that there is
no way for autofs to automatically determine the shares on a host, so I can't
just set up an auto mount point for /misc/HOST.  Are there flags for smbfs that
will let me mount a single host?  The alternative is to make some cron job that
goes and reads the shares on all the hosts and updates /etc/auto.misc then
restarts the autofs daemon.

> The Network Neighborhood is a very un-Unixy entity, though.  It works
> on Windows boxes because Microsoft is able to make some simplifying
> assumptions that aren't too appropriate on Unix.  Two that I can think
> of: (a) There is only one possible shell, EXPLORER.EXE, and incest with
> kernel filesystem internals is not considerd a problem; (b) There is
> only one user logged on, so there's never any difficulty determining
> which set of credentials to use.
> 
> Come to think of it, I don't know how much of the Network Neighborhood
> is being provided by the Windows kernel and how much by the Explorer.
> Perhaps it is *all* in userspace.  This is the approach taken by GNOME
> Midnight Commander, I believe -- they simulate the entire NN experience
> using smbclient.  (Which works as long as there *is* only the one
> shell, mc, with which all applications are tightly integrated.)
> 
> Peter
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