Accessing the WinXP Shared Documents folder

[bleakcabal]

I want to access the WinXP Shared Documents folder from another computer on a network. My computer was running winXP and my father's computer also. We have a small router. A dsl modem is plugged into the router and the two computer are plugged in the same router ( also my ps2 whith network adapter :) ). When both computers had XP we had access to Shared Documents folders when we installed XP without having to do much configuring ( just following a wizard actually ).

Now my comp has only linux ( my father still has only WinXP ), but when I installed Red Hat, for some reason the internet worked fine ( as you can see by me typing this ). Also when I check my control center in KDE it seems to have found and configured my ethernet network card by it's own. I didn't do a thing ( last time I tried to install Linux was about 3 years ago and I couldnt get internet and networking to work then ).

Now I have looked a bit at the Samba docs but they talk about setting the Linux computer as a NT server for NT workstations, I really don't want/need to set my computer as an NT server.

Is there a way to just access my father's shared documents folder ? Or all his folders ( I don't care which way but would prefer the easiest of the two ). Also I don't care if my father's or any other Windows 95/98/2000/NT/ME/XP can't access my files and he isn't interested in accessing my computer at all so this isnt a concern. I don't care about sharing network resources, cd roms drives and so on.

Is there something I can do beside setting a NT server on Samba with what seems to be a very complicated task for a Linux Newbie such as myself ( Linux has been installed on my machine for about 4 days now ).

Even if someone could just point me in the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

[michaelk]

samba doesn't have to be configured as a Primary Domain Controller just for file sharing. The default smb.conf for Redhat and Mandrake will work as is for most networks. Some minor tweaking like changing the workgroup name might be reqired. It makes it simple if you have the same user accounts on both computers and then add a samba user and password that matches the user account.
LinNeighborhood is a network neighborhood program for linux that you can download.

An alternative to samba would be to install a ftp server on one of the computers. The you could transfer files from the other computer.

[workingitout]

You could use smbclient to get a list of the shares on the XP machine

smbclient -L "dad's" (remove quotes & insert dad's computer name)

you can them mount the share using smbmount.
first create a directory to use for the share, or pick an existing one
su to root
smbmount //dads/sharename /mountpoint/youcreated

hope that helps

[bleakcabal]

Thank you both for your replies, im at school right now, but ill try these solutions when I get back home ! :) :)

[bleakcabal]

Wow ! When I got home I just did
smbclient -L "netvista"
smbmount //netvista/SharedDocs /home/gilles/Network

without touching to any config file and it worked !

Do I need to do this everytime tough ?


EDIT : When my dad's computer disconnected tough I experienced major slowdown anytime I tried to acces the directory containing the shared dir, is there a way to unmont it ?
smbunmount doesnt seem to work...

EDIT 2 : I found smbumount but altough it seems to have worked, I still have the speed problem. I will try rebooting my machine.

[workingitout]

I believe you can put that in your /etc/fstab file to get it to mount at boot.

as for the speed problem, maybe your dad shouldn't poweroff until you unmount the share??