Accessing windows SMB Workgroup shares

If you want to get access to workgroup shares this is a way to do it. I found lots of people lamenting that this was not built in.

This is not perfect as the shared directories don't appear in the file browser but they do appear in the file open and save dialogues for the open office tools and you can see them from the command prompt. I have not spent long looking at the file browser settings so it might be easy to get the file browser to see the shares. There again it might not. With ls -l the shares look the same as files which are readily vissible

This uses the FUSE-SMB package which provides an entry point in the file tree below which all the Workgroups can be seen as separate entries, below these are all the computers and below that the shares

The first thing to do is to get into advanced interface mode so you can add programmes easily.

1.Do alt FT to get a command prompt

2.Execute 'xfce-setting-show' which will give you the settings manager

3.Click on 'Desktop' to get to the 'Desktop Preferences'

4.Click the 'Behaviour' tab.

5.Under menus select the 'Show desktop menu on right click' option and close the window.

This allows you to bring up a desktop menu when you right click somewhere on the desktop. The Desktop Menu contains much more options than the limited user interface on the Aspire One.

6.If you want to become root then do sudo su which makes you root as root has no password by default.

7.Use the right mouse click to go to system and add/remove programs. Add the 'fuse-smb' and the 'fuse' packages. (They should have been linked as fuse-smb requires fuse the fuse utilities in the fuse package in particular fusermount.)

The default user is called 'user' so in all the commands below ~ is /home/user

8.Create a directory called .smb in you home directory with 'mkdir ~/.smb'

9.Give it permissions with 'chmod 777 ~/.smb'

10.Copy the text below into a file 'fusesmb.conf' in the ~/.smb directory and give it permissions of 600. There should be no spaces at the beginning of the lines.

; Global settings
[global]

; Default username and password
username=user
password=totallysecret

; List hidden shares
showhiddenshares=true

; Connection timeout in seconds
timeout = 10

;Interval for updating new shares in minutes
interval = 10

; Section for servers and/or workgroups to ignore
[ignore]
;servers=SERVER,SERVER2,SERVER3
;workgroups=WORKGROUP,WG2


11.Make the obvious changes *grin*

12.Edit the file /etc/groups to make the user group a member of the group fuse. Do this by adding the word user to the end of the line declaring the fuse group

13.Under ~/Documents make a file, called what you will, but I suggest 'network' make sure that it is mode 777 and that it is owned by user.

14.execute 'fusesmb Documents/network' and all being well you should be able to see your workgroups with 'ls Documents/network'

15.If you go to open office or some such then you can see files over the network.

I hope this helps
RIchard.

 

Network shares don't appear properly in the file browser, but symbolic links to them work fine - for example, I have a network share mounted as /mnt/mp3 and I created a symbolic link to it so it appears under 'My Music':

sudo ln -s ~/Music/mp3 /mnt/mp3

Now, when I have the network share mounted, all the files appear in the My Music/mp3 folder

Following Richard's example, you might want to try making and mounting the network folder as /mnt/netdocs and then doing: ln -s ~/Documents/network /mnt/netdocs

All your networked documents should now be easily accesible through in the 'network' folder under the My Documents icon

Cheers!

L3K

 

Thanks for the suggestion - I tried doing a symbolic link but i could not get it to work so I'll try again.

Perhaps I did not put the entry in the networks folder.

Does anyone know why the shares dont apear in the browser without any workarounds?

As far as i can see a file system mounted with FUSE should look indistinguishable from any other file.

Richard

 

I just noticed that in my original post the key code to get into the command launcher was written as alt FT should be alt F2 doh...

 

Hi folks - does this remount automatically on power up/wake after sleep? And generally handle sleep/power gracefully?

I don't have an AAO myself (supporting someone remotely through SSH), so can't experiment too much...

 

I would suggest looking at the Automount how-to, in the how-to forum, I used that method and find it to be great. I does not make drive mappings on the fly, but this method does not appear to do that either.

 

To bonasta,
Thank you for your detailed explanation.
I have two issues:
1.When I downloaded fuse-smb I took version 8. It installed cleanly but no other package came with it. Is this right or should I have taken version 7?
2. In step 12 (update /etc/groups) I don't have such a file. Should I create one?
Thank you for your help.

 

I have found that pyNeighborhood works well and is user friendly
Download pyNeighborhood
http://pyneighborhood.sourceforge.net/
sudo su
yum install make
yum install gcc
cd /home/user/Downloads (assuming you downloaded the file to your Downloads folder)
tar -xvjf pyNeighborhood-0.4.1.tar.bz2
cd pyNeighborhood-0.4.1
./configure
make
make install
Install Midnight Commander (mc)
Create a new folder /home/user/lan
Run pyNeighborhood, edit preferences and
1.set username and password if applicable
2.Set the Mount folder to /home/user/lan
I hope this helps.

 

Re PYneighborhood

All installed ok.
Runs fine.
Finds network shares. ( scanning host xxxxx_xxx ...success )
Then gives 'failed to mount' error

Checked the capitalisation etc of mount folder in preferences
all ok.
I can navigate in terminal to my share in /home/user/lan
But cant 'see' any files in the folder.

So a bit stuck now...

 

There are a few typos in the original post.

/etc/group (not /etc/groups)

Code:

sudo mousepad /etc/group

In the end of the file there is a fuse group, add "user" there, so that it will look like this: fuse:x:496:user

Create a new folder, not a file.

Here is a convenient way of accessing shares. Launch openoffice, browse for Documents/network, select desired workgroup, select a computer, right click and select "add bookmark". Bookmark all you plan access in the future. Then close openoffice and open your files as usual. See those bookmarks? Bookmarks will disappear after reboot. Click on a bookmarked computer, select a shared folder, right click on it and send it to Desktop (create link). The links will be in your Desktop folder after reboot. After reboot you only have to open terminal and enter fusesmb Documents/network. To access shares, click on "your files" (=open Thunar), click "My disk" to see the folder named "Desktop", double click the folder "Desktop".

 

I can reach the point of having all the computers on the network and all the shared drives within these computers show up when in OpenOffice, but no folders are visible within these shared drives. The shared drives are wide open and I can see and change their contents from other computers, except not from this.
I have installed fuse-smb version 8 (version 7 was also available). It did not pull in any other fuse packages with it, fuse itself was already installed.
Please someone tell me what am I doing wrong or what have I missed doing?

 

Check if the folder Documents/network has 777 rights.

Code:

chmod 777 Documents/network

, or right click on the folder, and there should be owner: user, group: user and the rest three options are "read and write". I have installed fuse-smb-0.8.5-7.fc7.i386, it is the only package that was offered. The package fuse was preinstalled. Check the folder .smb rights and file fusesmb.conf

(the rights should be 777)

 

Thanks for the help.
The permissions were O.K. On fusesmb.conf the system insists that it be 600 not 777.
My version of fuse-smb is 0.8.7-1.fc8.i386, but I doubt that would make much difference. By now that is the only version offered to me.
An interesting observation:
When I open file manager (thunar) and click on Documents/Network nothing shows. However when I do an ls in a terminal window all the shared drives show up (still no folders or files within the directories). I don't understand why, but I sure would like a better file manager (like konquerer) instead.

 

Hi Guys,
Read this post and thought I'd try pyneighborhood. I downloaded a version from Jan 9th, but it's install seems different. There is no ./configure as per the instructions in the post above. There is a setup.py however, and the readme suggests "python setup.py install". This attempts to run, but says it cannot find /usr/lib/python2.5/config/Makefile.
And sure enough there is no config subdirectory in my python2.5 folder.
I'm a linux newbie and don't fully understand this "make / install" stuff, so help much appreciated.
Currently I am running mount cifs scripts to achieve my goals, which are ok, but only ok.

Danny.

 

Code:

[root@localhost pyNeighborhood-0.4.1]# make install
`which python` ./compile
Listing . ...
Listing ./icons ...
install -d //usr/local/bin
make: install: Command not found
make: *** [install] Error 127
[root@localhost pyNeighborhood-0.4.1]# sudo make install
`which python` ./compile
Listing . ...
Listing ./icons ...
install -d //usr/local/bin
make: install: Command not found
make: *** [install] Error 127

Can anybody tell me why this happens?

 

I think you need to download the python-development package.
Advice I received also suggested I should check it was the same version as the pyneighborhood you downloaded.
I could not locate an exact match on the package manager, but installing the one available allowed me to complete the install of pyneighborhood.
Having said that, I have not succeeded in getting it working. I can't see anything and does not appear to be able to see any shares.
Having said THAT, I don't really know what I am doing and I may just too green with Linux. :?

D.

 

OK, I installed midnight commander and now pyneighborhood can browse servers and see shares, but I cannot mount with smb or cifs, so still stuck. :cry:

 

OK, sorry for all the posts.
Got it working.
You go into preferences and change the sudo command from what it was (can't remember) to sudo, then it mounts.
tada.
Mounted my music library, no I've got all my sounds on my lap.
Now I just need to either download a new music player, or an M4A codec for the one the give you on the One.

This is the best toy I have ever bought myself.

D.