One of the most important things people have to do, especially in business environments. Red Hat Linux 9 is awesome, but there’s a quirk in the networking, at least on the desktop, that’s a little frustrating. In the Red Hat menu now, there is a “Network Servers” icon that allows you to browse network shares that are locally available and this works really well.
But if there are network drives you need to access on a regular basis, you should do the following:
- make a mnt directory in your home directory
- make a directory for each of the network shares you need to access
- Open a terminal and enter root mode
- open /etc/fstab and add the share reference: //server_name/share_name /home/your_username/mnt/g smbfs noauto,users,exec,rw,username=your_username,password=your_password,workgroup=your_workgroup,uid=500 0 0
- at the terminal, type chmod +s /usr/bin/smbmnt and enter
- at the terminal, type chmod +s /usr/bin/smbumount and enter
- close the terminal
Now, when you right click your desktop, find the menu option that says “Disks”. To the right, the menu will now have a list of all the shares you put into /etc/fstab. It will display them by the name of the directory you put into the “mnt” directory. When you click on one, a new icon will appear on the desktop. Now you can open the network share and browse it and everything. To remove it, right-click the icon and select the bottom menu option “Unmount Volume”.