Sharing Between Linux and Windows

I’m going to be working with a home network with five machines. Their URLs are:

gw    my desktop  Linux 12.10
dell  old laptop  Linux 12.10
sony  new laptop  Linux 12.10
becky desktop     Linux 12.10
photo desktop     Windows 7

I use NFS connections for Linux-to-Linux, but interconnecting with Windows requires interfacing with the Windows Workgroup facility formerly called SMB and now called (at least by Microsoft) CIFS. The Linux (or OS-X) tool for this is called Samba.

Step by Step

On Linux, samba is not installed by default, so install the following packages:
```
sudo apt-get install samba smbclient cifs-utils samba-doc xinetd
```
xinitd isn’t really part of this, but you should install it anyway. Trust me. Note that if you are only trying to mount a Win share on Linux and not vice versa, all you need is cifs-utils.
Make sure the user name and password are the same on both the Win and Linux machines. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it makes the setup much simpler.
Make sure the workgroup name is the same on all machines:
On WIN7:
1. Control Panel --> System and Security --> System
2. Under Computer Name click Change Settings
3. On the Computer Name tab, click Change to bring up a box where you can enter or change the computer name and workgroup name.
On Ubuntu, edit /etc/samba/smb.conf. In the [global] section, create or modify the line
```
workgroup = MYWKGP 
```
or whatever.
Create shared folders/directories.
On WIN7, display the chosen directory in Windows Explorer. Click on Share With and choose Homegroup(Read/Write).
On Ubuntu,
- edit /etc/samba/smb.conf to create a section in the following form for each directory structure you want to share:
```
[home]
        comment = john home directory
        path = /home/dierdorf
        writable = YES
        guest ok = YES
        browsable = YES
```
  ...to create a share called home to allow WIN to access the given directory.
- Restart Samba with the command
```
sudo /etc/init.d/smbd restart
```
  or, if you installed xinetd like I said,
```
sudo service samba restart
```
To access a WIN share from Linux, simply mount it:
- Create the mount point directory in the usual way. In this example, it is /win.
- Mount with the following command. In this case I’m mounting my WIN shared home directory C:\users\dierdorf, which exists on machine photo, at mount point /win on Linux, with full read/write privileges:
```
sudo mount -t cifs photo:/users/dierdorf /win 
     -o file_mode=0644,dir_mode=0777,user=dierdorf,
     uid=dierdorf,gid=dierdorf
```
  Note the Linux-style forward slashes. (That’s all one long line. I put it in a batch file, but it would also be possible to set it up in /etc/fstab.)
  
  Last modified: Mon Mar 11 23:26:05 CDT 2013