Got it! Thanks for your help, Simon. Here were the steps, feel free to edit/improve/annotate them as useful--I'll be making a simple wiki page on this. 1. sudo apt-get install smbfs 2. Make folder on my desktop, named it, "dogimages" (not sure if must be lower case) 3. Right-clicked and selected Sharing Options, selected, Share this folder and Guest access. (little flag appears on folder--I'm using Jaunty). 4. Make the mount point-- sudo mkdir /media/dogimages (Directory name must be all lowercase, it seems) 5. sudo mount -t cifs -o guest //localhost/dogimages /media/dogimages 6 And a sharepoint mounted on my desktop! (is it called, 'sharepoint'? I was looking for a word to distinguish it from the folder created in step 2) 7. I added an image to the shared folder that I had created in step 2 and the image appeared in the mounted sharepoint :) This is great. Thanks for the detailed info. My next step (I'm not in a rush to do this) is that I will want to be able to fine tune on whose desktop this shows up. I want to be able to manage this by group membership. In other words I've got a group on my server called, "period2". I want to similarly mount a shared folder on the desktop of just members of that group. Is it very complex task? David <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 5:36 PM, David Groos <<a href="mailto:djgroos@gmail.com">djgroos@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> Thanks for all this info! I'll give this a go again when I get to school tomorrow AM. David<div><div></div><div class="h5"> On Apr 27, 2010, at 4:51 PM, Simón Ruiz wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 4:39 PM, David Groos <<a href="mailto:djgroos@gmail.com" target="_blank">djgroos@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi Simon, <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> I'm beginning to believe you're using LTSP? </blockquote> Yes. </blockquote> Ah! Makes so much more sense, now. :-) At our school every user is on their own workstation, authenticating logins off a Samba server and mounting their home folders and shared folders off another Samba server. We can't manipulate student's home folders because they're created from scratch at login, and students seldom log into the same computer twice, so we mount Samba servers dynamically on login and unmount them on logout. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> Here's my idea/suggestion, leaving in step 2, forgetting about Symlinks, and moving forward from there (I'm also checking the "Guest access" checkbox when I create the share on my Desktop.): </blockquote> I don't understand why you are checking the "Guest access" checkbox when you create the share on your desk because as I understand it in the next step you are creating the folder to be shared. </blockquote> I am checking the "Guest access" checkbox so that later when we mount it (particularly if we want to mount it automatically after reboots in the future), we can specify that we're mounting as "guest" and not have to bother with logging in. If that's not checked, we'll need to log in as a specific, valid, local user when we mount it. I do this because that information is intended to be easily accessible to all; I would *not* make it "Guest access" if it was important for people who *didn't* have a local account *not* to have access to it. That's the "side-effect", here: now anyone can mosey on over to your computer, see that you are sharing something called "Dogs", and look through it. I figure, if anything, this is a good thing. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> 3. "sudo mkdir /media/Dogs" - Create a folder to use as a mountpoint in the /media directory </blockquote> Did this and it worked fine. </blockquote> Actually, here I'm not creating the folder to be shared, I'm creating the mount point; that is, the local place (USUALLY an empty folder) where the "remote" share's contents will appear. The folder to be shared, the place you actually want to put the files you're sharing, is still /home/your_username/Desktop/DogTraits <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> 4. "sudo mount -t cifs -o guest //localhost/Dogs /media/shared" - Mounts the Samba share (using your loopback device; this won't slow down networking at all) to the folder "/media/Dogs" </blockquote></blockquote> First of all, I mis-spoke in the above sentence, it was *meant* to say: Mounts the Samba share "//localhost/Dogs" to the folder "/media/shared" <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> Did this and got the following output: <a href="http://pastebin.com/JPf22tCi" target="_blank">http://pastebin.com/JPf22tCi</a> so looks like it didn't work. Any ideas? I've got no immediate deadline but need to solve this. Also, I'd really like to set up an edubuntu wiki page about 'file sharing schemes for teachers' or something. Any help on naming/locating that page would be helpful. </blockquote> I can see the primary issue below: mrg@gcos2:~$ sudo sudo mount -t cifs -o guest//localhost/DogImages /media/shared You didn't place a space between the word "guest" and the first "/" of "//localhost/DogImages". Mount is trying to figure out what the option "guest//localhost/DogImages" is. ;-) The next problem would be that you're trying to mount the "remote" share to "/media/shared"; replace "/media/shared" here with "/media/DogImages", as that's the empty folder you just created. The next thing I see that *might* be a problem, unless you've changed something, is that you're trying to mount "//localhost/DogImages" when before you mentioned that you named the share "Dogs". Replace this with "//localhost/Dogs" if that's still true. So: sudo mount -t cifs -o guest //localhost/SHARE_NAME /media/EMPTY_MOUNTPOINT_FOLDER_NAME Becomes: sudo mount -t cifs -o guest //localhost/Dogs /media/DogImages Based on the info you've given us so far. Let me know if that's any better/clearer. :-) <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> Thanks David </blockquote> P.S. And, just in case it comes up: you might need to "sudo apt-get install smbfs" before this works; I don't recall exactly. </blockquote> </div></div></blockquote></div>