I picked up a Dell 4300 server for nothing (about what it was worth!) and am turning it into a file server here at the office. I ran a file server with Mepis, but this one has a collection of 6 drives with a total of about 100 gig storage, so I decided to do the "span/stripe" thing and install across all 6 drives. Can't do that with Mepis, so I went with Fedorah core 4. Pretty nice...., but if you don't turn off the security for the firewall (not just make your eth0 a "trusted" device, but turn OFF the samba security), you will spend all weekend cursing trying to figure out why you are getting the "network path not found" in your windoze boxes.
Anyway, I want to set up a chron job to rsync files from all 5 of the office machines, and I realized I don't have a clue as to where to find the files. Do I have to edit the fstab file to get it to mount, for example, //frontdesk/q/blah blah blah? With mepis, when you go out and click on the graphic pic of the network, it is "mounted" so that you can go in and just link up with the remote drive like it is local (the samba shares are listed in the home directory).
I try mount //frontdesk/.......and it tells me it can't find anything.
Anyone out there know a good idiot proof resource for Fedora, or better yet, someone here want to tell me what I need to do to mount remote drives in a terminal environment?
Thanks in advance
Ive never had that problem, if you think there are ports you don't know about bring down the firewall connect from a known client (and do nothing else from that client) and do a netstat to see what you need.. Install webmin (webmin.org) it makes iptables 10 times easier to configure.
Do I have to edit the fstab file to get it to mount, for example, //frontdesk/q/blah blah blah?
(1) Dont use fstab for connecting to windows it will cause nothing but trouble, use autofs because when you reboot a windows box you dont have to worry about a mount point getting stale, plus decreased traffice between the computers when its not needed.
(2) Keep in mind that windows by default shares the drives, dont worry about mounting specific shares just mount the whole drive and use the rsync script to pick and choose what you want to back up, no point in mounting more than you have to just that much more to go wrong..
I try mount //frontdesk/.......and it tells me it can't find anything.
Keep in mind with the command line mount you have to know what type of thing your mounting, in the case of windows its smbfs...
You could use mount -t smbfs (where -t is the type flag) but there is an easier way...
smbmount //server/share /mountpoint –o username=username, uid=uidofmountpoint, gid=gidofmountpoint, fmask=775
uid and gid will be the local permissions of the mount..
Trust me take the extra twenty minuets and do it through autofs the first time you should not have to worry about it all that often ever again.
BTW you should beable to use either gnome or kde to browse for smbshares but once they are autofs they are treated as local disk so far as your scripts go..