Mounting a Windows share R/W and working in it - possible?

Cloney · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2003 Posts: 65

I'm a bit of a newbie to Linux networking, so be gentle.

My girlfriend's doing an MRes in Mathematical Biology, which involves lots of LaTeX. I showed her Kile and she was suitably impressed, so I installed Gentoo on her desktop. She does most of her work on her laptop in SPSS, Matlab and Maple.

What I want to do is run Kile on a set of .tex files stored in a Windows share on her laptop - so it'll be updating and creating files on the Windows machine. Is this possible?

Before someone says "just use windows", she generally has about fifteen windows open, so a second desktop is handy anyway.

Ta in advance.

Cloney

SZwarts · Posted: Sun Nov 02, 2003 12:58 pm Post subject:

Question: What is a "windows" partition?

If it is Fat16/Fat32 it can be done easily... Just mount it with user rights.
If it is NTFS you can mount it readable and can edit it... Store it somewhere on a ftp site somewhere ini the world and it is fine also...
With the 2.6 kernel (Might be with 2.4 aswell) you can mount NTFS read/write but it is considered not stable (the writing that is) so it is not (yet) adivisable

But, your post suggest that is not (only) about mounting but about a share on another computer... In this case it is really easy. Just share it on the windows computer with write permission and use smbmount (should have samba ofcourse) to mount the shares.

for example:

Cloney · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2003 Posts: 65

Ta, worked a charm. I've got a shell script set up for her, and it should all go swimmingly; she's testing it out tonight.

Do I need to unmount smb partitions before rebooting, or is that all dealt with safely?

Cloney

SZwarts · Posted: Mon Nov 03, 2003 9:52 am Post subject:

Generally it is a wise idea to unmount things when you stop using them
(or in this case you can use smbumount too)
However I have the experience samba is pretty safe, for example if the host computer (the windows one in your case) goes down and up again and someone is accesing the mount point smb will re-connect automatically.
So I wouldn't be afraid...
But my experiences are that if the host computer is still turned off and someone accesses the mount point, it gets very laggy with all the reconnects and even unmounting at that time.
So to state it shortly, don't worry about the mounting stuff, but if you have the chance and unmount would be the clean way to do it.

violator · n00b Joined: 28 Oct 2003 Posts: 25

The partition SHOULD be unmounted when you shutdown (ie, with 'umount -a' used to unmount all partitions).