On 10/10/06, Eric S. Johansson <<a href="mailto:esj@harvee.org">esj@harvee.org</a>> wrote:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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.</blockquote><div> What version of VMware are you using? Workstation, Server, GSX, ESX? </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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 </blockquote></div>