UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Hi Folks -

I need to mount a Windows Share to a Linux server. What is the best/easiest way to do this?

Is this 'how-to' guide accurate:

How to Share Files Between Windows and Linux

Or is there a better method you could share?

Thanks!

It looks reasonably accurate. Mounting a share without a password isn't the greatest idea though. You may want to tailor it a bit more to your own needs; rather than giving access to everyone (dangerous for obvious reasons), open the share as your user and give it a password. -o user=linuxuser,username=winuser,password=pass

See man mount.cifs for more options you can put in -o to control permissions and the like.

Depending on your distro, cifs-utils may be the wrong package, or unnecessary - CIFS share mounting is a device driver, part of the Linux kernel, and might just be there already. If you don't have mount.cifs, try mount -t cifs.

Hosting a CIFS share on Linux is a totally different story, that requires the Samba package.

Thank you!

What's the difference between Hosting and Mounting?

Mounting: Share is on Windows, Linux attaches to it.

Hosting: Share is on Linux, Windows or other attaches to it.

Ah i see!

Yes, the share is on Windows and I'm merely just trying to access it from Linux. Therefore, mounting would the path forward, correct?

Correct.

As M$-windows and *nix don't have any intersection of protocols in common, you need to deploy "crutches" to make them talk to each other. On the MS side, there is smb (“Server Message Block”), their file sharing protocol (CIFS is a dialect of SMB). Deploy the "samba" suite on *nix to make use of it. On the *nix side, there is the nfs (“Networked File System”) protocol; there are MS windows NFS drivers that enable you to use it.