Samba facilitates file sharing across linux, windows systems for beginners
First create a folder in your Windows system, right click the folder and share the folder for network access. Let say that you have created a folder for share as “xpshare” and that the name of your windows machine is “windowsxp” (right click “My Computer” and select properties. Under the tab “Computer Name” you can note the name of the machine)
Now go to your Linux box.
Check the rpm package to ensure if samba, samba client got installed
$ rpm -qa ‘samba*’
If it is not installed, then install it using yum installer
$ yum install samba samba-client
Note the current directory
$ pwd
/tmp
Now issue the samba command to connect to windows box as
$ smbclient //windowsxp/xpshare
password:
Enter the password of your linux box and you will be connected to the windows machine and the command prompt will be changed to
smb: \>
To know the commands that you can use with samba,
smb :\> help
You can use the commands like dir, get, put, chmod, rmdir within the samba share
smb :\> get New File.txt (wrong)
smb :\> get “New File.txt” (correct)
In windows you can easily create and move file with names which has space in it. In order to get a file from windows with spaces, enclose the file name within quotes. Else you will get an error which would state “NT_STATUS_OBJECT_NAME_NOT_FOUND opening remote file \New” as it fails to go beyond the first space in the file name “New File”
smb :\> quit
Now the file “New File.txt” will be in the directory from where you initially connected to the samba share
$ ls -l (to list the file that was brought down from the samba share)
To know the version of samba that you are using , type
$ smbd -V
