[CLUE-Tech] Networking with Samba

[David Anselmi]

vbsouthern wrote:
[...]
> My wife is a lovely person and she is an expert in her field. However 
> she knows nothing about computers and depends on me to backup her 
> system. I have never been very good at networking computers so I have 
> relied on web sites for info about networking MS to MS systems.

You should not have to mess with smb.conf to copy files from Win to 
Linux.  smbmount will mount Windows shares on a Linux directory and let 
you copy/back them up.  You don't need to understand all the stuff Dave 
said about smbpasswd and so on.

I'll guess that you're copying the files from Windows to Linux by hand 
to back them up.  In that case you can also use smbclient (works a lot 
like ftp) and you don't have to mess with mounts at all.  Something like:

smbclient //<WINS name>/c$ -I <IP address> -D "directory you want to 
copy from" -A <file with login and password inside>

I'm not sure that you need -A with WinME.  Also, you can use -c 
"command" to run commands automatically once smbclient connects.

smbmount is a little cleaner to do Unixy things, but it has trouble with 
files larger than 2GB (for some systems) that smbclient doesn't.

Don't be afraid to look at the books mentioned.  You'll get much further 
with all this if you have a basic understanding of how Windows file 
sharing works and how Linux uses it.  The books mentioned will tell you 
that.

Dave