Thursday, April 06, 2006

 

SmbLaunch Explained

SmbLaunch will automatically search and mount available Samba and Windows shares.

Although one can use KDE or Gnome's GUI explorer to view the shares, they cannot be directly accessed by major programs such as OpenOffice or Digikam unless they are mounted. One can drag-and-drop the files, but this can be messy and confusing, and will slow the time it takes to save a file on remote computer by the necessity of extra steps.

LinNeighorhood is a partial solution to this. LinNeighborhood is user-friendly Samba/Windows share mounter. The user selects the shares and chooses where he or she would like to have them mounted. However, in medium to large organizations, this presents a problem. As a systems administrator in an office, I simply cannot afford to setup each individual computer to mount the shares. And it is not the users' responsibility to deal with mounting shares - partly because they are not that computer literate and partly because its my job to set up the computers. It is even a greater chore when a share is added, changed, or deleted.

I therefore decided to develop a program that searches for available shares and mounts them in a predetermined directory. The whole process is transparent to the user. All he or she sees is a directory with the available shares. When the program is run, all the available shares will be mounted and become accessible by all applications. There is no GUI clicking or dragging.

Please post a comment if you would like more information about this project.

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