Chapter 2. Exporting files

Table of Contents
SMB
NFS

There are two protocols by which you can export files: SMB and NFS. The former is the protocol employed by typical Windows(R) computers, and the latter is more common in the Unix world. Since the options available when employing either of these methods are very different, they have a tab each.

SMB

SMB shares have a number of options: Browseable, which allows others to see the share when browsing from other machines (if this is off, the share will be invisible, but users that know about it can still access it), public, which means that anyone has access to the share (if this is off, the user must have an account and password on your computer), and writable, specifying that users that can access this share can also write to it or delete files.

NFS

Each NFS share has a list of "client patterns", specifying computers that are allowed to access it. In theory, anyone using these machines can have access to the share.

A pattern can be an IP address (e.g. 10.10.10.5) or a DNS record (e.g. justice.copyleft.no). You can also use stars ('*') in the pattern, specifying that anything goes in place of the star. Stars do not match punctuations. Thus, the pattern "10.10.10.*" would allow access from "10.10.10.40" and "10.10.10.5", but not "10.10.11.40". Likewise, "*.copyleft.no" would match "wrath.copyleft.no", but not "petri.dish.copyleft.no" or "wrath.copyright.no". Remember that when using DNS names, you should use the authoritative name for the computer(s), e.g. what is returned by an nslookup on its IP address.