Samba Access Like Windows Explorer

[Michael Powell]

Jason C. Wells wrote:

> Is it possible to access samba shares much like windows explorer does?
> 
> The ultimate solution would be UNC names with browsing.  I would very
> much like to have my freebsd client see the network namespace in as
> similar fashion to windows as possible.
> 
> I also would like to avoid having to duplicate the hierarchy of mount
> points (for mount_smbfs) on every freebsd client in order to achieve
> this.  Nautilus access the samba shares this way, but I want this work
> on the command line.  Plus I prefer Thunar, which doesn't do samba
> access at all.
> 
> As it stands, I think I will have to mount all samba shares on a freebsd
> client into a top level directory named for the server name, with mount
> points sprinkled about.
> 

There two ways. I do it in Dolphin on KDE all the time. KDE has a kio_slave 
for smb:/ - that is it looks like this in the address bar:

smb://testbed.test.zip/web/   <- where the /web is a share

This is a GUI'fied way of hiding the CLI smbclient. It can be bookmarked, as 
well as made into icons in the left side of Dolphin for easy clicking. 
Smbclient works just fine from a command prompt as well.

The other way is to mount shares as file systems. This can be done with 
entries in fstab and an nsmb.conf file. If you were to pursue this route 
know that the workgroup/server/share info should be all Upper Case. Such is 
displayed in the example nsmb.conf but it isn't immediately apparent that 
upper case _must_ be used. Otherwise you end up chasing your tail wondering 
why it won't connect/mount.

Me I used to do mounts in fstab, but lately just use the kio_slave and 
smbclient approach because it does what I need.

-Mike