Re: [tlug] navigating the LAN

["Walter Hansen" <gandalf@example.com>]

> On my computer in my university office, they give me access to my
> directory on the network server through Win XP, using the desktop search
>  >> search computer >> network. I have to search for a string like
> "efs102n..." (I'm at home now, and I forgot to write it down).
>
> When I asked the technical in our "media sentaa" (sort of a
> second-assistant technical guy who I suspect doesn't know very much) if
> it was possible for me to do this through Linux--so that I don't need to
> switch to XP for every little thing--he told me flat-out "no."
>
> I've been taking his word for it for over a year now, but then today
> when I was setting up my printer in Linux (Debian w/KDE), I noticed a
> bunch of other printers from the network with colleagues names popping
> up in the list...which makes me think that perhaps I might have the
> access I want after all.
>
> I spend some time this afternoon going through the tabs on KDE's Control
> Center >> Internet and Network, such as "Local Network Browser",
> "Service Discovery," etc., but didn't see anything. It's not such a big
> deal, but with all the network specialists on TLUG, perhaps someone
> might suggest a couple of things I can try to check this out?
>
> Regards,
>
> Chuck
>

You could probably map a drive letter to the server share in windows, or
even create a shortcut to the server. Much easier than searching for it
everytime.

But on to the issue. Yes it is definiately possible. smbclient (you'll
have to have smb installed, but I think it comes with most everything
these days) will let you use a ftp like interface. The man page is a
little thick, so try a how-to if you can.

Then there is smbmount which will let you mount  windows share just like a
partition. You can even do it in your fstab if you like. I used to mount
the CD-ROM on a win98 box to my linux server on a directory in
/var/www/html and then read the manga in the CD-ROM on my lunch hour at
work. That started out with "damn, I left that at home" and ended about
ten minutes later with me munching and reading manga.

There are probably some gui tools for surfing arround a windows network,
but I don't do much in Linux gui so I don't know much about them. I think
I've done stuff from Knoppix disks before though.

Oh, and I have a perl program that I wrote a few weeks ago that logs onto
a NT4 Server box and downloads a bunch of files every couple minutes. It
actually creates a session, retrieves directories and then reads files. I
could have done the same thing by mounting the directory as a share and
then using the normal file tools, but I liked the idea of having the
program log on.

So, yes, he is quite wrong. If a windows box can log onto it, linux can
too. And yes you can use those network printers also. It takes some
fussing as I remember, but it does work.

One word of cation though. Windows networks are not secure. I think they
recently made them more secure, but their still quite hackable. So there
is a trust issue on a windows network. This is a very good reason why you
don't put a windows network (shares, printers, etc) on a wireless network.
30 minutes to hack the network, 5 minutes to hack the windows network and
there ya go.