USMB Howto

I have already mentioned that Samba is the network protocol that I settled on for file sharing on my LAN and that Usmb is the userspace file system used for this purpose. Yesterday, I even blogged about howto solve a particular problem you might run into with usmb. I settled on usmb after looking at a lot of alternatives including fusesmb. Unlike fusesmb , usmb does not have an RPM for 64bit systems and I had to compile it by hand (all you need to do is type make and make install). You do need to have the headers for samba and fuse present in your system. You can install them as follows:

yum install libsmbclient-devel

yum install fuse-devel

Then you need to create a ~/.usmb.conf file and then change it's permissions (600) so that only the owner can read the file. After doing all that, I am still having no luck. usmb does not produce any output when you execute the command (which is supposed to mean it was successful , yet the remote folder isn't mounted). There is nothing in the log file. It was then that I just thought I would do ls /mnt/radmedia/ (/mnt/radmedia/ being the mount point I had chosen). Lo and behold, there is a directory listing with the content of my home folder on my media server. Yet df does not show anything being mounted at that mount point! oh well, I can live with that. At this point I went back to fusesmb. As with usmb, no error message appears and df actually shows the remote folder as being mounted (the disk usage percentage is also correct). Yet you cannot list the contents of the directory or try to read any of the files on it. If that great mathematician Euler was alive today, he would just say use both.