In 1991, on Macintosh System 7, sharing a folder for network use involved highlighting the folder and choosing Share from the File menu. There were probably a couple of additional steps, but it was a simple, painless procedure. Not long afterwards Microsoft caught up (at least in this one, small regard) and Windows was provided with similarly friendly sharing.
I've been a unix user for many, many years and I'm comfortable at the command line. My favorite unix uses plain text configuration files for the most part, which is convenient for documentation and when I need to duplicate a working configuration on another host. I have long held the belief that GUIs should be optional on server operating systems, and secretly harboured a strong suspicion that graphics hardware had no place on a server. Something happened to me this week to challenge that doctrine.
My favorite unix is NetBSD, which I have used for years and know my way around fairly well. It's great for server use because it's rock solid and has a very friendly community of users and developers. It was an obvious choice when I had to set up a file server for a small network, mostly of Windows desktop machines. Because Windows has its own protocol for sharing file space over a network, I had to install Samba to run on top of NetBSD and serve up file space to the workstations. Samba is held in high regard and I certainly take my hat off to its developers.
Unfortunately I found it incomprehensible (yes, I read lots of fine manuals) and spent two very full days beating my head against it before LumberCartel, a member of the NetBSD community took pity on me and very patiently walked me through the ridiculously intricate ceremony to coax Samba into life (create lock directories, users, groups, share directories, hack Samba config file around, rinse and repeat). By 04:30 (local time) this morning, I found myself wishing that I could just "Click, Share." Sincere thanks to LumberCartel and other people from #netbsd on FreeNode who donated their time and attention.
1 comments:
The ability to easily share folders (directories) with Windows is one of the things that I actually like about it. It enables me to very easily move files from one computer on my LAN to another, and even more importantly, it enables me to show my wife how to do it so I don't have to do it for her all the time. ;-)
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