The Joys of filesharing via NX

[NoOp]

For quite some time I've been using NX (NoMachine) to connect to systems
on my local network; WinXP to Ubuntu, Ubuntu to Ubuntu. I'd never
bothered with testing file sharing as the system are all local and I can
easily use samba or sshf. However, I also support several remote Ubuntu
systems (relatives mostly) and decided to test NX's file sharing
features today.

First off, I couldn't find any easy 'howto' on this, so after a bit of
googling and testing various bits (without luck) I stumbled across this:

http://www.nomachine.com/ar/view.php?ar_id=AR08D00413
[How does printer and file sharing work in NX?]

<quote>
Please note that the NX node configuration file, namely
/usr/NX/etc/node.cfg,
provides the MountShareProtocol key to specify which protocol should be
selected by the node.

This key can be set to the following values:

both, either SMB and CIFS protocol are supported, this is the default value.
smbfs, only SMB protocol is supported.
cifs, only CIFS protocol is supported.
none, no network file-sharing protocol is supported.
</quote>

So... I set the key to 'both', fired up an WinXP machine NX client to an
Ubuntu hardy machine; no luck. I _finally_ figured out that you need to:

1. Have a shared folder on the Ubuntu server machine (I did) and the
share defined in /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg. The default is "MyShares" but I
just changed mine to 'tempdir' (see below).
2. Open up the NX client and select the 'Services' tab, then click
'Enable printer and file sharing' (I had already). _And_ then click
'Add' under 'Resources' and select the resource (the shared folder name)
and of course enter the password for the resource (I hadn't).

This last bit ('Add' under 'Resources') is what I had been missing. So,
in my case I have a shared folder named 'tempdir' that is rw that I use
for transfering files. I use the same on both the Ubuntu and WinXP
machines for simplicity. So on my WinXP client:

Resource: tempdir
Mount on: $(SHARES)/tempdir
Username: <username on the client>
Password: <password on the client>

Bingo! I log into the hardy machine & automagically my shared folder,
'tempdir' shows up on the NX desktop connected to the hardy machine. I
double-click, it opens up Nautilus, and I can see the WinXP 'tempdir'
folder, xfer files etc. I then check on the WinXP machine and find that
I have the hardy 'tempdir' mounted under 'My Network Places'. :-)

So, the next experiment was to try Ubuntu-to-Ubuntu. This didn't work at
first as I was going to the hardy machine to a newly upgraded
hardy-to-intrepid machine. I kept receiving cifs and smb errors. I
finally figured out that I needed to install smbfs on the intrepid
machine; once done all works perfectly!

Next step was to try remotely; fired up a connection to a remote Ubuntu
NX, tested, works - both from my WinXP NX client and my Ubuntu NX client :-)

HTH others.