ubuntu xp vmware cluster f...er...filesharing

[Eric S. Johansson]

Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> 
> I don't know what problems are you really experiencing, cause I have
> used VMware shared folders and SAMBA in the past with no problems.
> Maybe if you go into more detail, we can help.
> 

okay, here it is in shorter form:

problem as I need to store all of my project files on XP because that's 
where I back up from.  I need to make these project files accessible 
from multiple virtual machines.  This means I need some form of file 
sharing between XP and my virtual machines.  But this filesharing must 
preserve user ID and permissions because the Python distribution 
utilities use that information when installing modules.


VMware shared folders do not preserve user ID and permissions of the 
file.  They instead let anybody write and on read substitute 
700/root:root but still let anybody read.

This royally screws up Python modules stored on and installed from the 
shared folders. see below:

-rwx------ 1 root root 9077 2006-09-18 17:35 
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/file_queue.py

This module isn't usable by anybody except by root.  Not useful.


smb mount is easy. it can't find my XP share.  I have two different 
networks a private one and a public one.  The private one works fine for 
everything else.  I turned off the XP firewall and nothing changed.

The file navigator however can find the share more frequently.

But even if I do make smb mounts work, I have zero confidence it will 
preserve ownership and permissions correctly.  I would love to be proven 
wrong.

m# mount -t smbfs  -o username=esj,password=xxxx //first-triad/vm_shared 
  /mnt/projects
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //first-triad/vm_shared,
        missing codepage or other error
        In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
        dmesg | tail  or so

from dmsg

[17266329.376000] smbfs: mount_data version 1919251317 is not supported


At the end of the day, all I care is the ability to store files on XP so 
I can back them up, access them from multiple virtual machines running 
ubuntu and have the ubuntu permissions and ownership preserved in that 
common file store.  And to do so without costing myself hours of 
fiddling because it would be faster to modify the Python distutils 
environment to set permissions properly on its own.

---eric