OVERVIEW

Installing the samba package will allow you to share files and folders on your icon with windows systems. By default, a folder called public will be created and shared with all on the Icon's hard drive, but this powerful tool can be configured to share files and folders in many different ways.

INSTALLATION

1. Copy the samba-icon.ipk file to a folder on your icon. This can be done through disk drive mode or by use of a memory card.
2. On the icon, open the file explorer application and browse to the drive and folder containing the installation package.
3. Navigate to the package file and push select.
4. When the software installation application comes up, move down to "install software" and push select.
5. Reboot your icon after the 'software installation was successful' message is spoken.

USAGE

Direct Folder Access

1. After connecting the icon to your network, launch the network manager and find your icon's IP address.
2. From your windows system, go to the run box and type '\\[icon ip]\public', or two back slashes followed by your icon's ip address followed by public. After a few seconds, your icon's public folder should appear in an explorer window.

Mapping the Drive

If you ever get tired of entering the icon's ip each time you need to access its folders through Samba, you might want to map them to a network drive.

1. Open windows explorer on your windows machine.
2. Go to tools, then to map network drive.
3. Enter the path to your icon's public folder (see previous section(.
4. Use shift tab to find the list of free drives and pick one.
5. Push okay and wait for the drive to connect.

SYSTEM_WIDE SHARING

Many users have expressed an intrest in sharing more than just a public folder on their icon/braille plus. Some of Samba's security features need to be turned on before doing this to prevent outside users from accessing files on your system. The following method will allow you to do this, but is a bit complex:

1. Download and install the latest version of the samba-icon package.
2. Use the 'adduser [user_name]' command to add a new user to your system. This will be the user account which will be used to access your samba shares. If you're planning on accessing these shares through a Windows XP machine, you can save yourself the extra step of having to type a user_name and password each time you connect to the shares if you use the same user_id you use to access your windows machine. The value of the password fields does not matter here.
3. Use the 'smbpasswd -a [user_name]' command to add your new user_id to samba's database. For windows XP, set the password here to the same value you use to log onto windows.
4. Edit the '/etc/samba/smb-icon-full.conf' file and change each occurance of 'your_user' with the new user_id you have just created. You can also change which folders are shared by modifying this file. One quick way to do this from the console is by:
   1. vi '/etc/samba/smb-icon-full.conf'
   2. '%s/your_user/new_user_id/g'
   3. ':wq'

1. Finally, run '/etc/init.d/samba full' to copy in the full config file and bounce the samba daemons. Other options to this script include:

• public: for restoring public shares,
• full: change to full system sharing.
• disable: to stop Samba even through a reboot
• stop: temporarily stop samba (will come back on after a reboot
• start: start samba
• restart: stop and restart Samba

ADVANCED USAGE

If you are an advanced Linux user and wish to change the way in which Samba is set up, its configuration information is stored in the /etc/samba/smb.conf file on the icon.

Making changes to this file without knowing how Samba works could open your Icon up to several types of security risks, so if you aren't familiar with Samba, you should probably learn a bit about it before making any changes. There are many different articles and tutorials out on the internet about linux and Samba which can help get you up to speed.