networking Linux with Windows

NogDog

OK, so I've just installed Fedora Linux on an old(ish) desktop, and I'd like it to be able to network with my Windows 7 notebook. They are sharing the same router. My initial Google attempts have not located any relevant page that's not several years old, so I figured I'd check with you experienced Linux users as to whether you either know a simple solution or can point me to a good on-line resource.

NogDog

Doesn't matter to me, whichever is easiest to do. I just want to be able to share files between the two machines.

NogDog

I really just want to be able to work at whichever machine I want for different purposes/situations, but be able to easily grab files from the other as/when I need them (OpenOffice files, PHP scripts, images, whatever). If they were both Windows machines, I'd just set them up in the same workgroup and set sharing permissions on whichever folders I want to be accessible on each. Is that not possible with mixed OS's like this?

bpat1434

I would suggest using smbclient, as NFS does have some issues with shares 🙁 At work we have one development server, and each development "node" runs it's own OS (Windows or Linux or Mac). We set up a shared folder on that "node" and then tell the server where that folder is and where to mount it. Mount the folder and, providing permissions and such are set up, it works! You can mount almost any filesystem type 😉

We started using NFS at work, and that failed (required cygwin on our "nodes") and then switched to Samba so it's just a straight Windows share. Here's a quick and dirty read up on smbclient and connecting to a share. If you want to automatically reconnect on startup, you'd have to add it to your /etc/fstab file; however, that's trivial.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/SMB-HOWTO-8.html

Doug_G

Setup samba on the fedora computer. Once you have it configured and added windows users you can map drives to samba shares from windows.

Use PuTTy and WinSCP to do manual file transfers and to connect to your linux computer from windows via SSH. Typically SSH is the only open port in my firewall, you can tunnel pretty much any other service over the SSH connection.

You can setup a similar SSH server in your windows computer user cygwin. I have cygwin ssh on my windows 7 computer and I can use sshfs from a fedora computer to mount a windows drive in linux.

It takes some fiddling to get things set up initially, but once you do cross-platform resource sharing is a piece of cake. I've been running a mixed Fedora/windows environment for years and it works great.