Chapter 4

Working with Samba and NFS

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Sharing files with Network File System

Bullet Installing and configuring Samba

If your local-area network (LAN) is like most others, it needs the capability to share files between systems that run Linux and other systems that don’t. Though this percentage may be getting smaller as Linux use grows, it’s still too large to ignore. Therefore, Linux includes two prominent file-sharing services:

  • Network File System (NFS): For file sharing with other Unix systems (or PCs with NFS client software)
  • Samba: For file sharing and print sharing with Windows systems

This chapter describes how to share files by using both NFS and Samba.

Sharing Files with NFS

Sharing files through NFS is simple and involves two basic steps:

  • On the Linux system that runs the NFS server, you export (share) one or more directories by listing them in the /etc/exports file and by running the exportfs command. In addition, you must start the NFS server.
  • On each client system, you use the mount command to mount the directories that your server exported.

The only problem with using NFS is that each client system must support it. Microsoft Windows doesn’t ship with NFS, so you have to buy the NFS software separately if you want to share files by using NFS. Using NFS ...

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