Ubuntu file sharing

How to make them do what you want, not to rant on about. Slashdot is better for rants anyway.

Ubuntu file sharing

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Jul 28, 2010 9:55 pm

The new Ubuntu, Lucid (10.4) has a new file sharing mechanism that is pretty brain dead, built right into nautilus, and which has a lot of limitations. For one thing, it doesn't work out of the box unless you install apache and some modules for authentication -- lame. Further, it only really lets you share one pre-made folder under your user's home, called Public. This is a disaster for those who tend to have a great big disk mounted for just sharing around the home network, but not mounted over "/home/username/Public". You can do root-nautilus and maybe get other folders shared, but then they tend to be root-only without a lot of other messing around, it's just a mistake on their part.

Sadly, though, the newest version of tried and true (but complex and hairy) Samba changed some defaults that aren't properly handled in the new config file they install when you go and get it with synaptic, so it's hobbled too, out of the box. I don't have a detailed fix for this just yet, but I discovered that older versions of the smb.conf file aren't wiped on upgrade and they do work, and make the new version work too if you just copy the [global] section from an older one into the newer, comment-free one with a simple editor (you have to be root to write over /etc/samba/smb.conf). That fixed all over here. We spent about a day trying to manually "difference" the old and new, trying one line at a time that was present in one but not the other, nothing worked, so we just tried the above, and now all is sweet again. It now works again all over my mult machine network, including with windows boxes -- even ones running in Virtual Box on a linux host.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Doug Coulter
 
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