Re: Linux/WindowsNT

[Paul E. Johnson]

I have had lots of fun playing with my linux machine and sharing devices
with MS operating systems.  I hope that when you say NFS, you are a
bit open minded.  Look at SAMBA!  Samba works fine as a system for sharing
printers and zip drives back and forth between linux and MS systems. From
Linux, I can print on the printer attached to an MS machine.  From
Windows, I can write on a zip drive in the linux machine.  I've not tried
sharing tape or CDR because of speed issues. 

It is pretty easy to smbmount "shares" that are set up on either kind
of computer from the other.  There is a known flaw in the linux kernel
that makes Win95 shares work erratically when mounted under linux.
However, AFAIK, this does not affect WinNT.  Inside WinNT, there is
an even more better method of mounting remote systems on samba servers 
than in Win95.  Again, AFAIK, Windows systems do not support direct NFS
mounts, but they work OK with SAMBA..

The biggest hangup is getting the permissions/passwords problems worked
out. Just when linux folk figure out whatever half assed security scheme
MS is using, then MS changes. From WinNT 3.5 to 4.0 there was a change
form plain to encrypted passwords and Samba hasn't quite caught up, at 
least in my experience. But there are "registry hacks" for Windows that
you get with the newer samba src that will make it work out.  For some
strange reason, the restrictions on write permissions on the zip drive
under linux are difficult to overcome without giving full public
access to that drive. If it were a priority for me, I think I could figure
it out.

After reading lots of documentation on the Samba homepage, I found the
most useful thing was the Samba tip sheet on the Redhat linux site. That
is the place to look!

Here is the most peculiar problem I've run into.  On your MS machines, It
makes a big difference whether you run the Novell Client 32 or Microsoft
Client for Novell networks to access your Novell server, if you have one.
The two clients don't communicate with each other well at all, and so it
is (in my experience) very dicey to print from a WinNT station to a
printer shared by a Win95 system.  The problem has something to do with
the fact that the Novell client assumes it is already authenticated and
the MS system isn't smart enough to ask for a password. Much easier to
print from linux on the Win95 system. 




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