Linux with Sharity

Sharity is a software package that runs on Unix machines and allows you to mount shares exported by Windows (NT, 95, for Workgroups, etc.), OS/2, samba etc. in your filesystem. It's NOT an ftp-like client like the smbclient program distributed with samba, it really mounts the shares in your filesystem just as NFS does. Since the major release 2, Sharity supports browsing (like the Windows “Network Neighborhood”) and has a GUI for the configuration. This howto explains how to use sharity to access Windows partitions from FreeBSD. The same procedure should apply to similar operating systems.

Setup the shared folder

Share a folder in a Windows XP box and setup access rights on this share so that you can access it using your windows XP login and password. try to connect to the shared folder from a another XP bos to check that the sharing is correctly done.

Install Sharity

Download it from here

and install it (run the setup program inside the archive, you will be asked for several options, always choose the default options)

Start Sharity daemon

      /usr/local/sharity/sbin/sharityd

Mount your shared folder

      cifslogin //xxx.xxx.xxx.xx/Share -U nt-user

Access the file in /CIFS/machine/Share , where machine is the name of the machine whose IP is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

NOTE 1

you can only moun the share once at the time. Sharity detects other shares in the network and the default licence only allows one sharing at the time.

NOTE 2

Do not remove the package by deleting it with 'rm -r'. Sharity mounts servers in its install directory automatically. If you use a recursive delete, you may easily delete all the files on your servers! Use the uninstall script which is installed in Sharity's install directory instead!

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Labels: howto, unix, windows, services