Holy freakin' mackeral, I've just discovered SSHFS (pathetic of me, I know), and this thing is awesomely cool! Most of you know that you can mount Samba-shared drives using smbfs. In other words, you enable Samba on a machine, share a directory, and then go to another machine & mount that shared directory via smbfs, which makes it appear as though that remote directory is actually directly connected to your machine. Pretty freaking cool, except that (a) you have to have Samba set up, which can be a PITA, and (b) you can't share drives over the Net. But don't despair - now there's a better way. Using SSHFS, if you can ssh into machine BAR from machine FOO, you can mount a directory that's located on BAR and then access it on FOO, as though it was directly connected to FOO. It's super easy to do it - much easier than with Samba - and better still, everything is encrypted! To add icing on the cake, you can set things up in fstab to make the whole process more automated, if you so desire. ...

Well, I just spent a few frustrating hours the other night, & I wanted to help prevent the same from happening to any of you. I was trying to use SMBFS to mount a Samba share, & it just wasn't working. Samba was set up on Chaucer (whose IP is 192.168.0.25), & I was sharing the music directory, & I could connect via smbclient, so I thought everything was good. I tried mounting with this line: smbmount //192.168.0.25/music /home/scott/chaucer_music/ -o credentials=/home/scott/credentials,fmask=644,dmask=755, uid=1000,gid=1000,workgroup=HOME Seemed to work just fine. But Konqueror wouldn't display the contents of /home/scott, & just showed a blank screen (!), while ls ~/ on the CLI finally, after a minute or so, gave me this error message: ls: chaucer_music: Input/output error The only solution was to unmount the share: sudo umount /home/scott/chaucer_data Unfortunately, sometimes that didn't even work, & I had to pull out the big guns (normally, this is ...

Got an old machine sitting around that not's doing much of anything? Got an old hard drive - or maybe a new hard drive - that you'd like to make available to everyone on your network as a quick, easy, & efficient storage device? Then you, my friend, are interested in NAS: Network Attached Storage. Think of it as a quick 'n dirty file server, & you have the right idea. If you're looking for just about the simplest NAS setup you can possible have, then check out NASLite, which is basically a Linux-based OS that fits on a floppy. You insert said floppy into said old computer with said hard drive in it, boot off of said floppy, make a few config changes, and bang boom bing! you have a new NAS server on your network that any Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X user can access and use! Wheee! Now, keep in mind that this thing is simple. It ain't the most secure thing in the world. For instance, any one who can access the NAS server can read 'n write any file. If that item gets your pantaloons in a ...