Among the machines I run at home is a Microsoft Windows XP machine and when my Linux Ubuntu machines need to gain network access I’ve used the Samba (smb) tools. But it’s kind of naff using it, I’d much rather use the same NFS networking that’s used between my Linux machines. Then I’ve only one system to think about.

So rather than sharing folders on the XP machine which the Linux machines access through Samba, I’ve now setup the XP machine to use NFS to share its folders. NFS stands for Network Filing system and is a very common way of Linux machines gaining access to folders on other machines. First step is to goto microsoft.com and search for “windows services for unix 3.5”, download the 217Mb SFU35SEL_EN.EXE file and store on your XP machine. Once collected, run it, unzip into a temporary directory and then run the SfuSetup.msi installer. At this stage it will refuse to install if you have the XP ‘home’ edition. Convince it otherwise by using a hexeditor on the .msi file and change the portion “VersionNT = 501 AND MsiNTSuitePersonal” to read 510 instead of 501. It’s at address ED17C, at least for me :) If your not going to be happy with a hexeditor, then NFS is probably out your league anyways… Run the .msi installer and install NFS, reboot Windows after which you will have a new menu item to administer services for unix. The big issue here is matching between the users on your Ubuntu machine and those on Windows. Take a copy of the ubuntu /etc/passwd and /etc/group (eg via a usb drive) and use them in the “user name mapping” configuration tab. Aim for a map that shows, for example Windows user \\WDELL\Kevin mapped to unix user ‘kevin’. The select an XP folder to be shared and click “sharing and security…” and use the “NFS sharing” tab. I ~think~ you’ll also need to use the standard Windows sharing tab. Now from your linux machine you can mount the Windows folder as any other NFS folder. The XP error log (configured in the administration tool) isn’t too helpful but might help. A gotcha is that Windows (still!!!) needs drive letters so the mount command is: mount wdell:C:/sharefolder /mnt/wdell - where ‘wdell’ is the name of your XP machine. So now when I’m working on my main Ubuntu desktop I can interact with the Windows machine in a nice consistent unix type way. =Happy