A few years a go the affluent middle classes were sometimes referred to as "Two Car Familiies". I suspect that in 2006 we associate "Two Cars" more with convenience than social status. So I wonder if we now have "Two Computer " families.
If like me you have computers proliferating around the house, you like me probably think of it as more of conveniece and function than anything else. In fact with Multimedia, proliferation of computers follows centralisation of content in a strange sort of way. Our backend servers are growing bigger and faster as the amount of content grows. Our access to this content is via smaller lighter machines, one per room and one per person.
One of the first things that need to be sorted, is common access to all this content by different people and different machines. We may also need to think about differentiated access to this content as our family members want access at younger and younger ages.
With Linux we have two main options to share this content across all the machines in the house, NFS or Samba.
NFS
In simple terms NFS (Network File System) allows us to export a directory from one machine and import it to another on the network. You can set this up through YaST
SAMBA
Samba implements the CIFS Common Internet Filesystem or Netbios which is of course also the file system protocol that Windows uses. It therefore means that you can create a shared file system that works for both Windows and Linux.
With NFS or Samba we can make one of our Linux machines a dedicated file server. There is however a better and more low cost way of doing this, use a dedicated Network Attached Storage (NAS) device.
NAS
Network attached storage used to be only available as big iron for large scale data centres. Nowerdays we can get ourselves a little network attached storage box with 300GB of storage for under 200 pounds.
I have chosen to go with the Buffalo Linkstation, because it actually runs a little Linux kernel with the Samba file system software providing the sharing. It attaches to your wireless router and can also be a print server for USB attached storage. Now all the machines (Windows, Linux and Macintosh) in the house can get to the music photos etc. Even the MythTV systems around the house can make use of it.
The Linkstation also has its own Built in media server PCast which supports the new DLNA standardisation effort for device access to the content held on our NAS
Adding a Network Folder
You can very easily add a network folder using KNetAttach
Gekco->System->Network
for 10.1 You can get to the Network Folder by Clicking on My Computer and the Network Folders
 You can manually access the Network folder using Konqueror. Type smb:// folllowed by the ip address and share name. You can see my itunes lossless files for the HiFi here.
Amarok and Remote Files
Sadly the above method will not allow you to play files stored remotely, as the KIO system used by KDE to access remote file systems does not allow for the streaming of remote files. In order to play remote files in Amarok for example, you will need to physically mount the file system.
The Example below mounts the remote linkstation/nas directory onto the /media directory on my local machine.
( Dont forget to create set the host name for the remote host "linkstation" in YaST->
Network Services->hostnames. Enter the ip address of the linkstation" )
#mount -t cifs -o username=mythtv //linkstation/nas /media
The system will prompt you for a password. If you do not have one set just pres CR.
To make this permanent you can add some specific lines into the file /etc/samba/smbfstab. Here is my file (you will need to have the right user and password of course)
===============my /etc/samba/smbfstab=============================
# This file allows you to mount SMB/ CIFS shares during system boot while
# hiding passwords to other people than root. Use /etc/fstab for public
# available services. You have to specify at least a service name and a mount
# point. Current default vfstype is smbfs.
#
# Possible vfstypes are smbfs and cifs.
#
# The options are explained in the manual page of smbmount and mount.cifs.
#
# service moint-point vfstype options
//linkstation/nas /media cifs username=mythtv, password=mythpassword, uid=mythtv, rw
===============================================================
For those of you that are a bit more security concious you may want to use the Pluggable Authentication Module PAM to mount your remote file systems. The guide is Here
Graphical Admin of SMB shares
For those of you who dont like editing files then you might like to try smb4k, which you can install from yast. You will then find it in gecko->system->network.
You will need to change the permissions on /usr/sbin/smbmnt to make it work. log in as root and use this command.
#chmod +s /usr/bin/smbmnt
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