Sharing drives on virtual machine

[casaba]

I am having trouble finding information on the (seemingly) very basics.

 

I have a machine running XP and VMware with a Fedora 7 virtual machine. I have 4 partitions (e.g. photos, website...) and I was hoping to have shared access to these partitions.

 

After a lot of fiddling (sorry, didn't note what I did but I found that setting the drives as 'shared' in Windows did most of the trick) I now in Fedora I have a 'windows network' desktop icon in Fedora, with the name of my Windows machine. It takes a while to first open, and it lists not only the drives I added (e.g. "Websites (W)") but also all the Windows drives listed as "C$", "P$", "W$"... These latter drives with the $'s are inaccessible without authentication, which I don't really need as the drives I added (again, listed as "Pictures (P)" or "Websites (W)") are viewable and editable.

 

Now the questions:

1. Is there a more direct way to set up shared access?

2. Can, or should, I unmap the "C$..." drives? If so, how? (I'm thinking of how long it takes to simply open the Windows Network window.)

3. What address do I use in a config file to refer to these shared drives?

 

(My goal is to keep the local copy of my website where it is, editable with the Windows machine, and to use the Linux machine as a test web server. It is the Apache config file that I am trying to edit, changing the default "/var/www/html" to something like "smb://WinMachName/Websites%20(W)/www". I've tried several variations of this latter address with no luck; Apache won't start up. Any suggestions on a better way of setting up a test web server would be much appreciated. I have used WAMP in the past but thought that the VMware option would give me a taste of how web servers work, as well as finally get me working with Linux.)

[Dungeon-Dave]

Firstly, you'll have to configure and start SAMBA on the Fed7 box. It's probably pre-installed and sparsely configured (the config files tend to be full of comments, but try the HowTos on the subject if not).

 

Once it's started, it will start advertising certain directories as though they are shares on a Windows boxen. To see what is being shared, from the Fed prompt try: smbclient -L //localhost. From windows, use: NET VIEW \\FEDORABOXNAME. If you can't get anything to show up yet, you'll need to enable guest access on a directory or two - I think they're locked down by default now.

 

If sharing is enabled on the Fed image, map a drive under XP by browsing in Network Neighbourhood then right-click and "map" etc.. or use the NET command as above, eg:

 

NET USE W: \\FEDORABOX\WEBSHARE /PERSISTENT:NO (from a windows command prompt)

 

note: that "persistent" bit isn't really necessary, but just prevents XP from remembering the share at next reboot, otherwise it'll keep searching out for a share that may no longer exist.. I tend to add it out of habit.

 

If you get stuck on SAMBA, I've had varying levels of success, although "webmin" administers it quite nicely.