[Samba] How to share WIN partitions from SAMBA (Dual boot) Srvr to WIN clients?

[Malcolm Baldridge]

[Replying to list]

Quoting George Peters <wombat53 at optonline.net>:

> Malcolm - thanks for the prompt reply.
> I don't think I am trying to share a remote smbmounted file. Rather, I
> AM trying to share a LOCAL  (and presumably MOUNTed) WIN partition.

OK.

> Why am I doing this? On my home network, the WIN client runs WIN apps 
> like MS OUTLOOK that share one common OUTLOOK data file (one user at a 
> time) with my "server" WINXP machine. I want to have this box in Linux
> mode (not WIN).

You don't have many options then.

1) If you're stuck with using NTFS, you can only use read-only mode. Make
your smb.conf share those as read-only [you can enable fake oplocks on the
read-only shares for extra speed w/o risks].  You will need to mount the
share as ro.  Make sure you change the /mnt directory permissions to allow
browsing (+rx).

2) If you can reformat the partition to use FAT32 (note: despite Win2k's
protestations at FORMATTING a FAT32 larger than 32GB, the format DOES
support up to 127GB.  There are replacement tools for Win32 (which are
essentially ports of the Linux mkdosfs) to format FAT32's > 32GB.  Google
for them.

> How can I make it available? Is it even possible? I am prepared to
> forget about the Read-only constraint.

Sure it's possible.  It's very simple and straightforward.  Samba will
cheerfully share that read-only NTFS volume for you.

Cheers,
=MB=