Swatting Shares
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SWATting Shares
It’s almost becoming a theme for the day - configuring your Linux box via a browser interface. SWAT, the browser interface for Samba, makes configuring file and printer shares as easy as point and click.
If you’re using SWAT from the machine you’d like to configure as a server, simply open your browser and enter the address http://localhost:901. 901 is the port we configured for SWAT in inetd yesterday. If you’re configuring from a remote machine, enter the IP address rather than localhost. On making the connection, you’ll be asked for the root user’s password.
The main configuration screen of SWAT is very easy to follow and understand. You’ll have these options available from the main screen:
| Option | Action |
| Home | Main menu |
| Globals | Options that affect all operations of Samba |
| Shares | Set up disk shares and options |
| Printers | Set up printer shares for Windows clients |
| Status | Will display the status of the smbd (Samba daemon) and nmbd (NetBIOS request daemon) processes |
| View | Displays the current smb.conf file |
| Password | Display and adjust password settings |
Now that you’ve got an easy interface, let’s set up a share on the network.
- Click the Shares button on the main SWAT window.
- Enter the name you’d like to assign to the share in the text box next to the Create Share button.
- Customize any share settings, including the comment, the directory in which the share will reside and security options.
- Commit the changes with the Commit Changes button.
- Click the Restart button to restart the Samba server with the new configuration.
I hate to say I told you so. But I will. Configuring Samba to share files between a Linux server and a Windows client really can be that easy.
Tomorrow, we’ll go back to the command line with smbclient to browse other servers, send files to and copy files from them, and print to other shared network printers.
