Hi, this is my first post on the forums and am having a little trouble configuring file sharing on my network using suse. I just installed suse on this computer, and am wanting to allow other computers to store files on it as a file server. I was reading the online manual and in the personal file preferences, it shows an option to enable ‘share public files over network’. The problem is I don’t see that option when I open up file preferences. All I see is an option to allow sharing using bluetooth, nothing about sharing over the network. When I look in the network I can see the computer running suse, but when I try to connect to it, it says ‘unable to mount drive: connection refused by server.’ Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Hi, this is my first post on the forums and am having a little trouble configuring file sharing on my network using suse. I just installed suse on this computer, and am wanting to allow other computers to store files on it as a file server. I was reading the online manual and in the personal file preferences, it shows an option to enable ‘share public files over network’. The problem is I don’t see that option when I open up file preferences. All I see is an option to allow sharing using bluetooth, nothing about sharing over the network. When I look in the network I can see the computer running suse, but when I try to connect to it, it says ‘unable to mount drive: connection refused by server.’ Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
You did not say what kind of computers (Linux or Windows) you want to share with. I use Samba as it works with either type of computer. There are several things you need to do for it to work. Here is a link you could start looking through on Samba that can help. You can also search the forum on Samba and find many threads on the subject.
openSUSE SuSE Linux HOWTOs and Tutorials by Swerdna
There is a known problem with Samba, nmb and openSUSE 11.4. If you search the forums, you will find the solution to that problem as well. Good luck…
Thank You,
Hi, if you want to share files with other linux (and only linux, *ix) systems, i sugest you try it with NFS. Its easy to configure.
If you want to share with windows computers, samba is the way to go. There are basically 2 approaches you can take…
1.- use the windows-like “share files” feature, its easy to setup and use, but you have very little control over security, users, etc. This behaves almost exactly like the shared files system in windows xp.
To use this you must install the nautilus-share package (not installed by default i think), then on nautilus (the file manager) right click on the folder you want to share, and in the properties dialog you should get a “Share folder” option, just like the one in windows XP.
You probably have to open the necessary ports on the firewall too, go to yast-firewall and open ports for services samba and smbclient.
If you dont need custom/advanced control of users, etc. this is by far the easiest way to go.
2.- if you need to specify diferent access levels for diferent users, etc. then you need to install and configure the full samba service. This is far more complicated, and would most likely require you to do some reading and research.
You can also try the samba configuration app in Yast, (make shure to read the documentation for this tool first). But to be honest, i find it a bit “unflexible” and rather edit the samba configuration files manually.
You can find more detailed information about setting up a samba server on the official opensuse documentation.
Hope this helps
Thanks all for the quick reply. I followed both of your instructions, and I still couldn’t get my computer to share files with windows computers. I did a little googling and found this thread to fix my problem, if either of you are curious. the link is:
OpenSUSE 11.4 – Share folder with Windows
Thanks again for the help, it’s greatly appreciated 