European Wafaa

As is pretty common nowadays I have a storage system accessible over the network at home. Some people have a server, others have NAS units etc. Mine is the former, a Samba server providing file and print services to my various machines.

The problem lies with my smallest machine - an eeePC 701. As some may know there are issues with various SDHC cards, funnily enough I just so happen to have one of these problem cards a 16GB Transcend Class6 card - Coincidence? I think not someone just hates me So I'm left with little space for loads of files etc. Not a problem, just open up the filemanager and browse the network and Bob's your auntie! Whoa horsey, not so fast. You see I'm not using GNOME or KDE on this little white beauty, so no Nautilus or KDE simplicity. I am however using the compact and bijou XFCE, with its functional (give or take a couple of items) Thunar filemanager. Problem is Thunar doesn't do Samba browsing so I can't just do smb:/// to see what Samba servers are where etc.

I did however stumble upon a very good tip from El Reg, as I've always sucked at dealing with Samba and CIFS from the command line. Thank fully they're doing a tweaks article for the Acer Aspire One which runs XFCE on a Fedora base (openSUSE needs to get in on this OEM lark more, and not just put SLED on there). Low and behold they tell you how to mount a remote share and browse to it using Thunar, thanks chaps.

For those that wish to avoid browsing to other sites what you need to do is this (replace the variables obviously - $BLAH):

Create a folder locally somewhere, I chose the desktop as it is relatively empty. Then run sudo mount -t cifs //$SERVER/$SHARE $LOCAL_FOLDER. When it asks for a password, that's the password on the server not your local machine.

Now I have much more storage available to me whilst connected to my network