[Courses] learning fedora

[Devdas Bhagat]

On 24/06/04 23:09 +1000, Narelle wrote:
> 
> ooh, it's been a while since I properly
> unixed... too many years in mgmt...
> 
> apologies if this is the wrong list, but I
> was after some sympathetic help :-)
Courses is the wrong list for that. You should be writing to newchix
instead. I have set the reply-to to that list as well as CC'ed it.

> I've recently reinstalled (with some help I
> have to admit) a linux box at home. Lovely
> firewall, gets the kids off msn and onto
> their homework (and I can log any prowling
> creeps), but I can't figure out the use of
> floppies or samba between the M$ boxes.
For any kind of media, the filesystem on the media has to be attached to
a node under the root filesystem. This process is termed as mounting (I
guess from the days when you actually mounted tapes).
The mount(8) command is used to mount filesystems.

Merely putting the media in the drive will not mount the filesystem [1].
You have to explicitly mount it. 

If you wish to attach the floppy filesystem on media in your first
floppy disk drive to the tree at /mnt/floppy, you would use the command
mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy.

If the floppy is DOS formatted, you could specify the filetype with
mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

If you have an entry for the floppy drive in /etc/fstab (see fstab(5)),
then you do not need to specify the device.
The entry will be something like:
/dev/fd0       /mnt/floppy	vfat 	users,noauto,owner	 0 0

If you are running a GNOME/KDE desktop, you can just double click on the
floppy drive icon and have the files available.

Before ejecting the floppy disk, remember to unmount it.
If you write anything to the floppy, remember that writes are done only
when unmounting the device and hence if you just pull the floppy out you
will not have the data on disk.

The command for this is umount(8)
umount /mnt/floppy.

Via the GUI, right click on the floppy icon and hit unmount.

> How do I read files locally on the home LAN
> or on the sneakernet floppy I just shoved
> into the linux box's drive?

Samba:
SaMBa is an implementation of the Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB)
protocol.
The easiest way to configure Samba is via SWAT, the Samba Web
Administration Tool. 

If you can run Konqueror on the Linux box, then you could just do
smb://ip.of.win.box/share to see the Windows share.

If you are looking for a console mode technique, then you have two
options:
1> smbclient
This offers a FTP like interface to a SMB share.

2> smbmount
This option does exactly what the mount command does, only mounts the
remote file system locally. Then you can just cd to the directory and
work normally.

Hopefully, this information was sufficient to get you up and running.

> It should be running okay, it should just be
> a matter of restarting it or setting permissions?
Restarting what?
 
> I thought ls /dev/fd0 would work...
ls /dev/fd0 will literally list the device entry (the "everything is a
file" paradigm [2]).

> or floppy <something>
> 
> again, apologies if this is the wrong list,
> but I was after some sympathetic help :-)
> just direct me hence and I'll go whither I'm
> sent :-)
> 
> answers gratefully accepted

Devdas Bhagat

[1] The common option for modern desktop oriented distributions is to
use a daemon [3] named automount. This will mount your removable media
automatically.

[2] Not really. Pipes, directories, character and block devices are not
normal byte streams. To see a pure implemention of that concept, see
Plan 9.

[3] Background tasks in Unix which are supposed to keep running until
shutdown are known as daemons. The Windows equivalent is "services".