[ILUG] Sharing A Drive

[Vincent Cunniffe]

Frank Murphy wrote:

> Finally installed Fedora Core 1.
> Using server setup.
> 
> Q1 How do I find a 2nd hd I formatted as Fat32,

'more dmesg' to show what drives were detected during bootup. It will 
probably be visible as /dev/hdb or /dev/hdc. This is the physical drive.

'fdisk /dev/hdb' (or /dev/hdc, as relevant), to show a list of the 
partitions and their sizes on the selected physical disk. This will 
indicate which partition on the physical disk is formatted with the 
FAT32 partition that you want. If there's only a single partition, then 
it'll be '/dev/hdb1'

To mount the partition so that applications can access the data :

   mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /mnt/dosdisk

and to arrange it so that the disk is always remounted on boot, and 
safely unmounted on reboot, add the following line to /etc/fstab :

   /dev/hdb1 	/mnt/doskdisk		vfat	defaults	0 0

which will tell the kernel to always mount that partition under that 
directory, as a VFAT (FAT 32) partition, using the default options.

The 'mount point', /mnt/dosdisk, is a local empty directory onto which 
the contents of the disk are mounted. At that point the entire directory 
tree of the newly mounted drive will appear under the /mnt/dosdisk 
directory. Obviously, this is an example : you can call this whatever 
you want and have it anywhere on your directory tree.

At this stage the disk is visible to Linux, mounted as a local disk, and 
visible to any *local* application on your server.

> Q2.  then how do I share it with samba.

Stage 2 : now that you can see the data locally, samba can see it also, 
which means that you only need to configure samba to export it. This 
requires you to tell samba where the data is, what you want it exported 
as, and what permissions you want to assign to it.

Add a section such as

   [public]
      comment = Public
      path = /mnt/dosdisk
      force user = guest
      public = yes
      writable = yes
      printable = no

to your /etc/samba/smb.conf file, which will tell samba that you want to 
export that directory, calling it 'Public' to everyone else. The other 
sections indicate that you want to force all user accesses to it to use 
the local user 'public', and that it can be written to.

For a more detailed explanation of this, 'man smb.conf' will explain how 
to handle advanced configurations.

> Q3. How do I get samba to autostart and mount this drive

In order to get anything to autostart (i.e. on boot), it needs to be in 
the startup directory. If this is a pure server, it will probably be on 
runlevel 3, which is the non-graphical mode. This means that all of the 
startup scripts in '/etc/rc3.d' will be executed. If you have a server 
with a graphical startup, then use the runlevel 5 directory : /etc/rc5.d 
instead.

Either way, just make sure that there is a link to the samba startup 
file in the directory, which will appear as :

	S70smb -> ../init.d/smb

or equivalent. This is not a script in it's own right, but a softlink to 
the real startup script which is in /etc/rc.d/init.d. If there is no 
link present, and you want to add one, then cd to the directory and :

	ln -s ../init.d/smb S70smb

which will create the link for you.

In future, every time the machine starts up this script will be run 
automatically, starting the samba server and exporting whatever it's 
configured to handle.

> Q4. What config is needed in the firewall , to allow access from the 
> local PC's

Ports 137 and 139 to and from any machine involved in exporting or 
accessing data. These are the service ports that Windows uses for 
running it's SMB system on, which Samba copies.

Regards,

Vincent