Managing Windows Shares' the Easy Way with Smb4k

Have you ever tried to configure Samba using the config text files? Did you curse? Well, I have. At work I would have to jot down others Windows share names on paper so that I could later mount. That was painful, one mistake, and you are back in your co-workers office asking for the same details again. Yeah sure, I could ask for an email with the data, but that seemed like begging to me. I stumbled upon this program while installing Mandrake 10 Community for an upcoming review. If you are surrounded by a sea of Windows, Smb4k (KDE application) is your life vest.

Feature's

• Scanning for (active) workgroups, hosts, and shares
• Mounting and unmounting of SMB shares, including unmounting all shares at once
• Access to the files of a mounted SMB share using Konqueror
• Auto-detection of external mounts/unmounts
• Mounting of recently used shares on start-up
• Miscellaneous infos about the SMB shares
• Network search
• WINS server support
• Preview of SMB shares
• Selectable look-up and search methods
• Default login
• Ability to execute mount and umount SUID root
  
• Special handling of homes shares
  
• Ability to bookmark favorite shares
  
• System tray icon
  
• Support of advanced Samba options
  
• Translations: Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese Simplified, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian

This is the main program window. This window shows all the shares that have been found in a scan. It also shows the shares that are currently mounted. Even shares that were not mounted with Smb4k. How sweet, see that search function!

The Appearance configuration menu controls all the little details of an SMB share that can be displayed. There is even some eye candy controls with "Show shares as list instead of as icons".

In the "Shares" config menu, you can control where on your local Linux file system the actual share gets mounted. Smb4k also has some memory, in that Smb4k can restore shares that were recently used on program startup.

This configuration parameter allows two methods of scanning the network, a WINS Server, NetBios Name Server or broadcast packets. On a large Windows network that spans multiple domains and subnets, using the broadcast method (SCAN) would be time consuming and might draw the unwanted attention of network administrators due to the resulting broadcast storm.

This is where you can manage your access credentials to various SMB networks and shares. This is pretty handy and all in one place, unlike Windows, where its done on the fly.


The home of Smb4k can found at http://smb4k.berlios.de/. This is the rpm I use with Fedora; smb4k-0.3.2-1.src.rpm. You can also google for your distro like so; "smb4k fedora src rpm". After you have installed, run these two commands as root:

chmod +s /usr/bin/smbmnt
chmod +s /usr/bin/smbumount

Remember to always wear your life vest when swimming in a sea of Windows shares.