MCP SHARES MAPPED FROM A LINUX SYSTEM??

[Andres Abello]

Hi Everybody,

has anyone map a drive in a Linux System from MCP? or is it possible to map the drive in windows, and then that mapped drive on LINUX??

thanks.

[Marc Wilson]

In comp.sys.unisys, (Andres Abello) wrote in
<88a06f81-09ce-4763...@googlegroups.com>::

>Hi Everybody,
>
>has anyone map a drive in a Linux System from MCP? or is it possible to map the drive in windows, and then that mapped drive on LINUX??

Don't know about MCP, but you can certainly reference a Windows disk
from Linux, using something called SAMBA.


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[Paul Kimpel]

Yes, you can connect from Linux to an MCP network share, except that
"map a drive" is a Windows concept. In Linux you "mount" the remote file
system represented by the share. This works in the normal way, e.g.,

mkdir -p /mnt/home
mount -t cifs -o username=PAUL,password=******** //MCPHOSTNAME/_HOME_
/mnt/home

where MCPHOSTNAME is the name or IP address of the MCP server, and
"_HOME_" is the name of a directory share on that server. "mnt/home" is
the "mount point", and is just a directory node in the Linux file
system. If it already exists, you do not create it first as I did in the
example above.

Once the share is mounted, you can "ls mnt/home", "cat
/mnt/home/myfile", "mv mnt/home/myfile /mnt/home/yourfile", "cd
/mnt/home", etc., just as with any other network share.

There are a few things to watch out for, however:

1. The MCP has supported the SMB (port 139) protocol since MCP 1.0 (SSR
43.2, I think), but has supported CIFS (port 445) only since MCP 12.0
(SSR 53.1). In addition, CIFS may need to be enabled in Administration
Center.

2. I've tried a couple of relatively recent Linux distributions (Fedora
14 and Puppy 5.4.3 [Precise]), neither of which support the older SMB
protocol in their standard releases. This could be a problem if you are
trying to connect to an MCP version older than 12.0 (all of which are no
longer supported by Unisys). In my tests, I was able to mount a share to
an MCP 12.0 host, but not to an MCP 10.0 host. The mount command would
not accept "-t smbfs" as an option. It is probably possible to build SMB
support for these distros, but I haven't tried it.

3. #2 above notwithstanding, it appears that the smbclient works with
both SMB and CIFS hosts. This command provides capabilities similar to a
command-line FTP client. I was able to run smbclient against both hosts
from both of the distros I tried, however.

4. Watch out for case sensitivity of passwords. You may need to enter
the MCP passwords in the case in which they were defined to MAKEUSER or
Security Center. I didn't have that problem in my tests, but some Samba
configurations may require case-sensitive passwords.

5. Similarly, watch our for name resolution issues. CIFS appears to use
normal domain name resolution and ignore entries in /etc/samba/lmhosts.
If you do not have name resolution for the MCP host working, you may
need to make appropriate entries in the Linux /etc/hosts file (or as a
last resort, use IP addresses).

--
Paul

[andrew....@t-online.de]

I know n-o-t-h-i-n-g-k about MCP but have always found cifs to be backwards compatible to smbfs. If there are problems then they can be solved via command-line options (or smb.conf), compiling in smbfs support is absolutely not the way to go.

[Paul Kimpel]

andrew....@t-online.de wrote:
> I know n-o-t-h-i-n-g-k about MCP but have always found cifs to be backwards compatible to smbfs. If there are problems then they can be solved via command-line options (or smb.conf), compiling in smbfs support is absolutely not the way to go.
>

This is interesting. My Linux knowledge isn't that great, so after
reporting earlier that I could mount a cifs share to a MCP 12.0 server
(which has both SMB and CIFS support) but not to a MCP 10.0 server which
has only SMB support), I went and looked at the /etc/samba/smb.conf file
on my Fedora 14 system. It appeared to have support enabled for both
ports 139 (SMB protocol) and 445 (CIFS protocol).

I tried again to mount a share on the MCP 10.0 system, and it still
didn't work, but after having fooled around with this earlier in the
week, the error message seemed to suggest there was a name resolution
problem. I added the host name for the MCP 10.0 system to the Linux
/etc/hosts file, and voilà -- it worked.

I suspect the problem I had earlier was that I had added the MCP 10.0
server to the /etc/samba/lmhosts file, but not to /etc/hosts. That makes
me think that Linux cifs does not use lmhosts for name resolution.

Thanks, Andrew. Your hint about smb.conf was really helpful.
--
Paul