Sharity-Light – connecting Microsoft to FreeBSD
The main page for Sharity-Light is http://www.obdev.at/Products/shlight.html.
You
might also want to see the NFS article.
NOTE: If you want to access FreeBSD file systems from your Microsoft
box, you want Samba.
3 November
Today I wanted to try accessing my NT box from my FreeBSD box. So I installed
the Sharity-Light port.
Installing Sharity-Light
If you need to know how to install a port, here is a section from the FreeBSD Handbook.
Here’s what I did.
Note that I had CD#3 from FreeBSD 2.2.7 in my CD drive.
- mount /cdrom
- cd /usr/ports/net/sharity-light
- make install
- umount /cdrom
The Sharity-Light files are installed in /usr/local/sbin.
Sharing an MS File system
This section deals with sharing an MS file system. I’ve done this from within
Windows NT. But the process for Windows 95/98 should be similar. In this
example, I’ll be sharing c:\temp and allowing only the user Barny to
access it. The following steps are performed on the MS system.
- start Windows NT explorer
- right click on c:\temp
- click on Sharing
- click on Shared As
- click on Permissions
- click on Remove to remove Everyone’s access
- click on Add
- click on Show Users
- click on the user you wish to add (in my example, I clicked on Barny)
- click on Add
- select the Type of Access you wish to provide. I choose Read.
- click on OK
- click on OK
- click on OK
This should now allow the directory to be shared. The next section describes how
to access this share from FreeBSD.
Accessing an MS file system
In the previous section, we published, or created, a share. In this section, we
will access that share from our FreeBSD box. The NT box from which we issued that
share is named NT1. So we will mount that share under /nt1.
mkdir /nt1 cd /usr/local/sbin ./shlight //NT1/TEMP /nt1 -U barny -P password
where…
- is the mount point we are going to use
- //NT1/TEMP
- is the share issued on the NT1 box.
- -U Barny
- specified the user id
- -P password
- specified the password
Accessing an MS file system
To unmount the file system, issue the following command:
./unshlight /nt1
Documentation
The best online documentation I’ve found is the following:
ftp://ftp.obdev.at/pub/Products/Sharity-Light/Sharity-Light.README
Limitations
You will find that dates and times are not correct on the files from NT4 file systems.
For more information, please refer to the documentation mentioned in the previous
section.
A few things to mention that I had to do in order for this to work.
1. You must be able to ping the netbois name of the MS server, in this example NT1. If you can not ping NT1, then add it to your /etc/hosts file.
2. When using the -P password, I found that if the password contained the @ symbol, shlight would not work.
Also, dont forget if you want this share to be mounted at boot up, add the command to script at startup.
Just found this site and man, I love it! Thank you, you guys provide the most detailed helps out there… 😉
and to add, make sure you add the computer you are trying to access into your /etc/hosts file… for example, if i wanted to add my windows box named "bone" I added the following line to the /etc/hosts file:
192.168.0.3 bone.myhostname.com bone
where 192.168.0.3 is the ip of that windows machine
bone.myhostname.com can be your network hostname
and ‘bone’ is the windows computer name
i was playing around with samba 2.2.8a on FreeBSD 5.2.1 tonight, and had everything working (smbclient -L hostname showed my server), but i was having trouble mounting the drive. was giving me errors saying the -o option was not supported when using "mount -t smbd -o username=user,password=pass //HP/share /mnt/share
I found your post about Sharity-light, installed it and it worked like a champ the first time around. i added the command to my startup script. Just wanted to say thanks for sharing this info!