The Great Shared Directory Dilemma

[Matt Graham]

From: Wayne Davis 
> So, I run win 7 Pro.  This "cifs" thing looks like the way to go. But 
> is CIFS being used as a transport mechanism to and from the network even 
> though i'm mounting it?

CIFS is a network protocol.  mount.cifs and the cifs kernel module provide a
way for communications to/from a CIFS-running machine to talk to the kernel's
VFS, and make those networking comms look a whole lot like a regular
filesystem on a Linux machine.  The Samba daemon (smbd) on Linux resides in
userspace, listens on ports 137..139, speaks SMB or CIFS to clients, and
reads/writes a filesystem in response to the stuff in /etc/samba/smb.conf . 
Basically, mount.cifs allows a Linux box to read/write stuff on
//MACHINE/SHARE .  Samba allows a Linux box to provide CIFS services to other
Windows/Linux/OS X machines.

> and NFS would NOT be usable in this case... right?

'Doze doesn't speak NFS out of the box.  It will probably be easier to use
Samba and mount.cifs if there are one or more Windows machines in the mix
here.

> What I need is some directories on each machine to be visible to every 
> other machine, _*and*_ one directory in ALL machines visible to ONE.

You'll need to set up Samba such that it does that, then.  There are *a lot*
of options you can set in smb.conf , but it doesn't sound like you're doing
anything really complicated, so one of the Samba frontends like webmin could
make it reasonably easy for you to do this.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see