GLLUG meeting topics

[Matt Graham]

"Keyes, Randall" <randall.keyes@jnli.com> wrote:
> In the "real" world of multi-platforms, I am very interested.  Here at JNL
> we are running DOS, W95, W98, various editions on NT 4 wkstn and Server,
W2K
> professional (can server be far behind?), NW 4.x, NW 5, AIX, Solaris, IBM
> mainframe...and two Red Hat Linux boxes tucked away somewhere...
> 
> All that to say, I'd like to know how inter-platform operability works on
> Linux.

> From: Jeff Goeke-Smith [mailto:jgoeke@newmerc.goeke.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 10:40 AM
> 
> Oh yes, Samba was covered once. I remember it well as I was one of the
> people
> presenting it.  If there is a desire for another round of samba, I might be
> up for it.

[snipp]

Most Linux distros have the ability to mount SMB filesystems out-of-the-box. 
The things people get hung up on are the mount syntax and smbmnt(8)'s
requirement that the mount point be owned by the mounting user.  That probably
didn't make any sense, but say you have a SMB share called STUFF on a 'DozeNT
box called BORG.  You wish to mount that on /mnt/smb/stuff .  You'd do it like
so:

mount -t smbfs //BORG/STUFF /mnt/smb/stuff -o
username=MYNAME,workgroup=WORKGROUP,password=PASSWORD

Fairly obvious, but that only works if you are root.  Extra options, like
uid=, gid=, and umask= are in the man page for smbmount.  If you would like
normal users to be able to mount certain shares, you have to edit /etc/fstab,
and the *user doing the mount must own the mountpoint*.  If you have the
following in /etc/fstab,

//BORG/STUFF /mnt/smb/stuff smbfs noauto,user,username=bob,workgroup=
workgroup

...then when user bob tries to mount the filesystem, he'll get a misleading
error message unless /mnt/smb/stuff is owned by bob.  If multiple users on a
Linux system must access a SMB share, then it is probably best for the share
to be mounted by root and access to be controlled by the umask= parameter and
group membership.

COnfiguring smbd and nmbd, for making a Linux box serve SMB shares like it was
a DozeNT box, should be straightforward but there are an awful lot of options.
 The manpage for smb.conf is 9500 lines long, almost as long as the man page
for bash(!)  The big thing to watch out for here is permissions problems. If
you're using a RedHat machine and having lots of different people access a
Samba share from 'Doze, the
user-private-never-to-be-sufficiently-damned-groups feature will make it
impossible for users to use each others' files.  To get around this, you set
the "force group", "force directory mode", and "create mask" options for the
share in question to appropriate values.  ("smbusers", "2775", and "775". 
Sacrificing security for interoperability, hoo boy.)

There are a number of other things that can go wrong with Samba that have
mercifully slipped my mind.  I've heard of problems with 2K and Samba, but we
have a box with Samba 2.07 serving a mixed NT/2K network, and the 2K machines
haven't complained or suffered hideous slowdowns.  (Note that the PDC is an
Alpha running NT4SP3 [ack], so YMMV and check the website.)

netatalk is reasonably good at providing Appletalk services, but there are no
tools that work properly that allow a Linux machine to mount an Appletalk
volume.  (Anyone using MacOS 9.x or below machine as a fileserver is probably
not playing with a full deck, but....)

Netware is a whole different can of worms full of Pandora's boxes.  The only
Netware network I ever got a chance to play with was in the process of being
dismantled, so can't say too much there.

NFS under Linux sucks, but NFS under [insert platform here] sucks.  The
suckage is consistent, at least, though you may wish to avoid NFSv3 for the
time being.  

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
There is no Darkness in Eternity
But only Light too dim for us to see

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