Samba

[Jonathan Hutchins, Rune Webmaster]

----- Original Message -----
From: jared

> I have a debian linux box connected to my win2k machine and I want to have
the
> linux computer mount win2k at boot.

> I have been doing this manually by the command
> "mount -t smbfs "\\hostname\sharedfolder" /mountpoint"
> I am then prompted for a password.  (Note: to get to this point i
> had to make user "root" on the win2k system and am mounting
> from root.  the password is for the "root" user on the win2k machine)

> Here is my question.  Is there any way to edit /etc/fstab to do this on
boot
> and enter the password without any user interaction?

I think it's generally considered poor practice to mount remote file systems
from fstab at boot.  What I've done in a similar situation is to use the
autofs system, which runs a daemon that automatically mounts a remote share
when you try to access it.  It's not perfect, especially under a GUI,
because until you mount the share there's no icon to click on to access it,
but it can be set up with a username and password so that non-root users can
just cd or ls or whatever and it will automount.

The howto's pretty good: http://linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Automount.html

(Note that there are security problems with autofs, with stored passwords,
etc.)