[Samba] difference between samba and smbclient

[Michael Wood]

Hi

On 14 August 2011 20:07, alex wallis <alexwallis646 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi list.
> I am wondering if I am running the right software to get my windows 7 shares
> mounted.
> could someone please tell me, what is the difference between samba, and
> smbclient?
> at the moment, I have samba and smbclient installed.
> I also have smbfs installed, though I understand this is deprecated, I just
> thought I might be able to get smbfs to work whereas I can't get samba,
> smbclient and cifs to work.

Samba is for creating shares on your Linux machine so that e.g. your
Windows machine can mount them.  i.e. it is for the reverse of what
you want to do.

smbclient is for connecting to remote shares, but using a command line
interface like an FTP client.

If you want to mount a Windows share so that it forms part of your
filesystem and can be accessed as if it were a local filesystem you
need cifsfs (i.e. mount -t cifs ...).  smbfs is the same sort of thing
as cifsfs, but as you say it's deprecated.

See Mark's answer and also read the "mount.cifs" man page:

$ man mount.cifs

Otherwise you can try using the GUI to connect to the share.  In older
versions of Ubuntu this was under the Places menu and then "Connect to
server".  Or else in the file manager (Nautilus) under the "File"
menu.  I haven't used Ubuntu 11.04, so not sure it's in the same
place.

> however, I am unable to get any of them to mount my shares,
> samba doesn't even seem to try and connect to my share, smbfs and smbclient
> do, but they return a message about no suitable address being found.
> so out of all of these packages, what do I need to actually have installed,
> as its quite confusing having all these different packages.
> I want to share files from windows 7 64 bit to my distro based off ubuntu
> 11.04, I am not going to be sharing from linux to windows 7.
>
> I did install a gui for samba called system-config-samba.
> it seems to add a section to my /etc/smb.conf file, containing what I put in
> for the share, but doesn't seem to mount.

As mentioned above, Samba is for sharing local filesystems, not for
mounting shares.

> You would think they could have created some kind of gui for mounting
> shares, so much easier than the terminal.

There is one! :)

See above.

-- 
Michael Wood <esiotrot at gmail.com>