Share folders & disks on Ubuntu 8 box to Macs & PCs?

[rumplestilts]

Again, I see much complexity in the 2 (or 3, if you include having PCs as clients) procedures necessary to get NFS running on both server and client(s). Samba is already there on the clients and the server installation requires only four steps to share the folders out to the network.

I'm sure there's something not very kosher about using the admin account and password for client login to the shared folders but I'll address that down the road.

Thanks

[rumplestilts]

Wow! I think I just found my ultimate solution: It turns out that I can share an HFS+ formatted hard drive connected via USB (or, presumably, FireWire) to the Ubuntu box over the network to a Mac client that connects via SMB. (Not an original discovery; I was searching Google for something else and it came up.) I'm running some tests with 4GB files to see if anything crashes or freezes.

If it all works, then dmizer's advice to stay clear of ext4 until the freezing bug has been eradicated is easy to follow as I can install Ubuntu on the internal HD with ext3 partitions and connect HDs (already initialized as HFS+ on a Mac) via FireWire, and share these drives out to the LAN. (Thank you, dmizer.)

The beauty of this is that, if necessary, I can unmount any of the shared drives and bring them over to a Mac where the requisite disk- and data recovery tools with which I am familiar are available.

This actually simplifies things (although my procedure for sharing and mounting now requires an additional command in the Terminal:

$ chown -R username:username /media/drivelabel

(where "username" is my login username and "drivelabel" is the actual name of the volume)

This needs to be done right after the drive is connected and mounted but before the "shares-admin" step. It changes the ownership of the newly mounted hard drive from "root" to me (so I may setup the sharing).

As I write this, I'm copying over a 5.29GB file (just for grins) to the Ubunto box via 100mb Ethernet. If it copies properly (and I have to believe it will given that the volume is HFS+ and can handle large files with ease), then I think I'll be setting up some Ubuntu file servers in town.

I'll still play around to see if guest access can be enabled just for these external drives. More to do tomorrow.

[dmizer]

To avoid the chown, you could add an explict mount command in /etc/fstab for the drive. To work something up for you though, I'd need to see the output of (with the drive connected):

sudo blkid

and

df -Th

[rumplestilts]

It looks like I only have to do the 'chown' command once for each drive just so it's set for R/W for both me and the clients logging in over the LAN (who are logging in as me).

As I understand it, when a drive is first initialized by Gparted, it's owned by 'root' so I have to 'chown' it to make it accessible by me.

Is there another username I could use that would make the drive R/W accessible by everyone (guests)?

Thanks!

PS - I'll post the output of those two commands later this evening. I'm in between consultations at the moment.