Sharing Drives

[Guest]

Hello,

I'm just getting familiar with 15.04, and I have a question about the visibility of drives on a home network running Windows 8.1.

I have three internal storage drives in my Linux computer that I've formatted with NTFS so I can create a simple RAID on the Linux computer that is accessible in Windows.

Any setup suggestions? My main Windows PC cannot yet see the Linux computer.

Thanks,
Brad

[xennex81]

Fwiw, Samba is also called CIFS on Linux, e.g. there is a package cifs-utils I believe.

[oshunluvr]

Hello,

I'm just getting familiar with 15.04, and I have a question about the visibility of drives on a home network running Windows 8.1.

I have three internal storage drives in my Linux computer that I've formatted with NTFS so I can create a simple RAID on the Linux computer that is accessible in Windows.

Any setup suggestions? My main Windows PC cannot yet see the Linux computer.

Thanks,
Brad

I think you may have made a few incorrect assumptions and choices:

1. If the drives are in the Linux PC, the Windows PC will not care or know what file system (format) they are. The Windows PC will only "see" the file sharing protocol, not the host file system.
2. NTFS is generally a bad file system choice for a Linux machine for several reasons, among those is because it's not native to Linux. Use a Linux file system.
3. RAID isn't very hard to set up, but can be a bit to maintain and has potential risks. Assuming you think you need RAID only to combine the three drives, I would suggest not using RAID at all and either use the btrfs file system or bind or aufs mounts.
4. Whether or not the Windows PC "sees" your Linux PC has little to do with file sharing. Obviously, they must be able to communicate via your network, but that doesn't automatically allow them to share files. You can check connectivity by a simple ping from one to the other.

To share files with a Windows PC, as Teunis suggests you need to install SAMBA server on the Linux PC and configure it properly. There are dozens if not hundreds of how-to's out there so try it yourself and then post a new topic if you have trouble. Don't forget to search this forum also.

How best to configure or combine the three drives will depend on your desired use of the space. If you just want a large file system and don't care about backups or organization, btrfs or aufs is the way to go, btrfs being the simplest. Post back with what you wish to do and we'll make suggestions.

[xennex81]

I think btrfs is going to be too complex for this user, as it is for me. Aufs is also not easy to set up (mainly due to the extremely dense manual (man page)). I think LVM with multi-drive volume group is easiest to accomplish in this regard, but the user was not asking for such help.

Of course it is entirely correct that using NTFS on your Linux mounts has no bearing on what Windows "sees" or gets connected to. Regardless, it might work for a while.

Good luck with the samba server setup! It should be easy. Just ensure a default workgroup and a CIFS name and it should pop up right away in your Windows Network Shares.

Btw, what kind of RAID have you created?