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Sharity-Light - connecting Microsoft to FreeBSD 3 November 1998
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The main page for Sharity-Light is http://www.obdev.at/Products/shlight.html.

You might also want to see the NFS article.

NOTE: If you want to access FreeBSD file systems from your Microsoft box, you want Samba.

3 November
Today I wanted to try accessing my NT box from my FreeBSD box.  So I installed the Sharity-Light port.
Installing Sharity-Light
If you need to know how to install a port, here is a section from the FreeBSD Handbook.

Here's what I did.  Note that I had CD#3 from FreeBSD 2.2.7 in my CD drive.

  • mount /cdrom
  • cd /usr/ports/net/sharity-light
  • make install
  • umount /cdrom

The Sharity-Light files are installed in /usr/local/sbin.

Sharing an MS File system
This section deals with sharing an MS file system.  I've done this from within Windows NT.  But the process for Windows 95/98 should be similar.  In this example, I'll be sharing c:\temp and allowing only the user Barny to access it.  The following steps are performed on the MS system.
  1. start Windows NT explorer
  2. right click on c:\temp
  3. click on Sharing
  4. click on Shared As
  5. click on Permissions
  6. click on Remove to remove Everyone's access
  7. click on Add
  8. click on Show Users
  9. click on the user you wish to add (in my example, I clicked on Barny)
  10. click on Add
  11. select the Type of Access you wish to provide.  I choose Read.
  12. click on OK
  13. click on OK
  14. click on OK

This should now allow the directory to be shared.  The next section describes how to access this share from FreeBSD.

Accessing an MS file system
In the previous section, we published, or created, a share.  In this section, we will access that share from our FreeBSD box.  The NT box from which we issued that share is named NT1.  So we will mount that share under /nt1.
mkdir /nt1
cd /usr/local/sbin
./shlight //NT1/TEMP /nt1 -U barny -P password

where...

is the mount point we are going to use
//NT1/TEMP
is the share issued on the NT1 box.
-U Barny
specified the user id
-P password
specified the password
Accessing an MS file system
To unmount the file system, issue the following command:
./unshlight /nt1
Documentation
The best online documentation I've found is the following:

ftp://ftp.obdev.at/pub/Products/Sharity-Light/Sharity-Light.README

Limitations
You will find that dates and times are not correct on the files from NT4 file systems.   For more information, please refer to the documentation mentioned in the previous section.

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