"Trent Shipley" <tshipley@symbio-tech.com> wrote:


> Q: To browse from Red Hat to NT4 I used smbclient.  Is there a more
> convenient option that turns a Linux machine into an SMB client?

You could simply use mount or smbmount to mount a share directly, like so:

mount -t smbfs file://winserver/sharename /mnt/mountpoint -o
username=user,password=MyPasswurd

This won't help with browsing though.

> Q: I have heard *nothing* good about NIS/NFS.  Will I be forced to use NFS
> to network the Red Hat, SuSE, and FreeBSD machines?

NFS works well enough, but if you're already using NT on the machines with
resources you want to share, then you could use it in place of NFS. Not
necessarily "better", but if you already are using NT, it's one less
administration issue. Samba on the Linux machines will allow sharing of
those resources similarly.

Here's the relevant line in my /etc/fstab:

//winserver/sharename    /mnt/backups    smbfs
username=backups,password=MyPasswurd1234 0    0

Assuming the smbclient programs have been loaded appropriately (I'm using
Debian), I just do:

mount /mnt/sharename

on my Linux machines, and I can access that share (running on Win2K in my
case). This works well in scripts and such. I can also access Win9x shares
this way.

Hope this helps!

- Bob