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.
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.
SmbLaunch Version 0.5.0 Available
SmbLaunch version 0.5.0 is now available for download. At this time, it is a shell script and can be downloaded at http://labinternet.com/smblaunch/smblaunch.sh
Install into your preferred directory and run it as a shell executable. This version is a prerelease, so many of the configurations and options are not yet automized. You will need to go into the script and manually edit it.
These are the configurations that you will probably need to edit:
1. Main SMB Directory
2. The username and password
3. Choose either mount or unmount SMB shares by adding the # at the appropriate lines
Todo:
1. Get configuration from configuration file either located in /etc/ or user's home directory
2. Pass parameters, such as mount or unmount, from the command line
Special thanks to nightflier for his indispensable and helpful contribution. Also a word of thanks to the entire Vector Linux team for their warm devotion and help.
Install into your preferred directory and run it as a shell executable. This version is a prerelease, so many of the configurations and options are not yet automized. You will need to go into the script and manually edit it.
These are the configurations that you will probably need to edit:
1. Main SMB Directory
2. The username and password
3. Choose either mount or unmount SMB shares by adding the # at the appropriate lines
Todo:
1. Get configuration from configuration file either located in /etc/ or user's home directory
2. Pass parameters, such as mount or unmount, from the command line
Special thanks to nightflier for his indispensable and helpful contribution. Also a word of thanks to the entire Vector Linux team for their warm devotion and help.
