Can Linux and Windows be friends?

Written by Wednesday, 03 August 2005
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I made them dance together yesterday. They danced Samba.

Essentially, it allowed my gentoo box to share a few directories over microsoft networks and to mount windows network drives onto the gentoo box.

It also allowed a very happy me to log into the gentoo box remotely, mount a drive from a computer in the remote LAN and download a photoshop file I had forgottent to take with me.

This is cool. Computers on the LAN are now accessible remote.

EEEK!

What's that saying about security?

Basically, I think I'm no less secure than I was before - if I someone could've hacked themselves into the root account, they could've easily installed samba and most likely gain access to the other computers on the lan.

Well, as long as I remember to unmount the drives when I'm finished, it's as safe as it was - you'd need the usernames and password of the other machines to mount drives.

Sheesh. How paranoid must you be in order to be a security expert? I'm merely dabbling in the stuff and I already suspect my grandmother to be working with the ennemy...

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3 comments

  • Comment Link Patrice Levesque Thursday, 04 August 2005 posted by Patrice Levesque

    You can make a volume user-mountable by adding "user" in the options field of a mountpoint inside /etc/fstab. See `man 8 mount` and `man 5 fstab`. Pretty useful for removable media like DVDs/CDROMs.



    Speaking of mounting, there are a couple of clever tricks one can do with minimal configuration, like mounting a remote ftp server so it becomes "part" of the local filesystem, all network transactions becoming transparent.



    There is even a way to create a "magical" directory, let's say, "/mnt/magic/ftp" where you can automagically mount remote ftp servers:

    cd /mnt/magic/ftp/ftp.download.com/

    ls

    # hey this is cool stuff!



    These tricks use lufs and autofs:

    http://lufs.sourceforge.net/lufs/usage.html" title="http://lufs.sourceforge.net/lufs/usage.html">lufs.sourceforge.net/lufs...

  • Comment Link Eric Maziade Thursday, 04 August 2005 posted by Eric Maziade


    Aaah, so that's what smbclient is for. I tried fiddling with it for a (very short) little.



    Do you always need root acces to set up a mount?

  • Comment Link Patrice Levesque Thursday, 04 August 2005 posted by Patrice Levesque

    To access remote SMB shares, you can also spawn `smbclient` which offers a FTP-like client. Quicker than a full mount/umount cycle when you only want a handful of files.



    So you don't need root access on your GNU/Linux box to fetch data from your Win shares, only a regular user account.



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