Quick and Handy Samba Setup

I just never got around to setting up and using Samba on my home network. I had my files in SVN or would login to the box that had what I needed, or used some other mechanism. But a certain case kept popping up that forced me to get it in place.

I have one server that has all of my movies, music, etc on my home network. I wanted to be able to access all my music from other machines. Using gnump3d was, aside from annoying for long term listening, a waste of bandwidth. Instead, I created a share on my media server accessible without password only on my LAN, and mounted this as my music library on my other machines.

To set up the first part, I followed this handy tutorial. He has all the details, but basically you just installed samba on the machine you want to share from, edit the conf file to create a share with no password access locally, and restart samba.

Then, on the machine you want to access the files from, you install smbfs. After that, create a dir you want to mount the shared files from (in my case ~/Music), then run
sudo smbmount //myserver/myshare ~/mnt. After that, you should be able to browse files you are sharing from the mountpoint you specified. Easy!

More details on setting up Samba, as well as having a shared directory mount on boot, may be found here. One last thing. smbclient allows you to find information on local shares from the machine you are sharing from. For example, smbclient -L SERVERNAME allows you to see all available shares on SERVERNAME.