Mus4b's Blog

Share files between Linux and Windows

Posted on August 13, 2009. Filed under: Linux |

بســـــــــــــم الله الرحمن الرحيــــــــــــــم

I finally just finished installing a dual boot XP 64bit and Ubuntu 64bit on a high end machine and shared the files between the Linux and another machine that has XP 64bit through a crossover cable. Sharing the files between linux and windows was new to me, I didn’t know that Linux cannot see windows shares without installing a special tool called Samba. In this article I will do my best to explain the process of sharing a files between linux and windows to save other people the headache of searching for the solution from different resources.

• The basic steps – will go quickly over them

Now we have 2 machines, 1 with XP installed and the other one has Linux Ubuntu

On the windows machine select the folder that you want to share, share it and give it a share name say “WinShare”
Assign the NIC card on both the windows machine and Linux an IP Address, Subnet and default gateway.
Windows: 192.168.1.100 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1
Linux: 192.168.1.101 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1

Have a user name with password on the Linux and windows machine

Windows: Username: Administrator  Password: Musab
Linux: Username:Musab Password:Musab   OR username: root password:Musab

• Installing Samba

now that both are connected, windows can see linux shares but the other way around so will need to install a tool called Samba

Open the terminal and log-in as root using the sudo command or sudo su on some new Ubuntu versions

Type  apt-get install samba smbfs

Now that you have it installed, let’s configure it, edit the configuration file by entering the command

gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

Find the following section in the file

####### Authentication #######

# “security = user” is always a good idea. This will require a Unix account
# in this server for every user accessing the server. See

Delete the first line that starts with #”security =

replace it with

security = user
username map = /etc/samba/smbusers

This will tell Samba to look in the smbusers file to get the list of usernames and passwords

Now let’s create a Samba user account, replace <username> with any name you prefer

smbpasswd -a <username>

in out example I will use MusabSamba –>  smbpasswd -a MusabSamba

Now we will need to add that user to the smbusers file we discissed earlier

gedit /etc/samba/smbusers

In the file type the following, replacing the first username with your Linux username and the second with Samba username we created earlier

<username> = “<username>”

In out example its    <Musab>=”<MusabSamba>”

I added this line too just for being paranoid o make it work <root>=”<MusabSamba>”

Now you can create the shares, next step I will walk you through the steps of mounting windows shares

• Mounting Windows Shares:

Open the terminal, and login as root

First you will need to add some lines to the /etc/hosts files

gedit /etc/hosts

Give the windows machine any name by adding the line

192.168.1.100   anyName

Save and close the file. Create a new folder where the share will appear

mkdir /mnt/winFiles

Edit the /etc/fstab file and add the following (Notice the windows machine name we assigned and the folder we created)

//anyName/winFiles  /mnt/winFiles  cifs exec,credentials=/etc/cifspw 0 0

Notice the line will use a file called cifspw that contains the credentials, let create the file

gedit /etc/cifspw

In this file you need to add the username and password for the windows machine we discussed earlier

username=Administrator
password=Musab

Save and close. Now secure the file with this command

chmod 600 /etc/cifspw

finally type

mount -a

You should see the shared folder under /mnt/winFiles or under Places tab and click network.

-Enjoy

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