Accessing the Windows file system from the MindTouch VM

This post is based on an excellent forum post found at http://forums.developer.mindtouch.com/showpost.php?p=8015&postcount=6

In order to access the windows file system, you must use Samba. Samba is also used when accessing the Linux VM file system from windows. Samba comes pre-installed on the MindTouch VM, however, it is missing the files required to access the windows file system from the VM.

The first thing to do is create a shared directory on your windows machine. To do this, create a folder and enable sharing. This is done differently on various windows operating systems. The screenshots below show an example from Windows XP.  

1. Right click on the folder and select Sharing and Security	2. Set the folder to be shared and set the share name

  You have to now update the Samba installation to the latest one.

Log in to the VM as the root user and type:

apt-get install smbfs

(note: if this does not work, try updating your apt-get by entering apt-get update);

 2. Type: "nano /etc/samba/smb.conf" and find the line that says workgroup = and add your domain to the end, i.e.

workgroup = domain.com

Press Ctrl+O to save and Ctrl+X to exit. (Note, by default the smb.conf file is part of the WORKGROUP workgroup, so you may not have to do anything if you have a standard windows setup).

4. Type: "nano /etc/fstab" and paste the following on the last line:

//serverIP/desiredfolder /mnt/servername cifs username=’username',password=’password’ 0 0

Make sure the username and password that you use has access to the directory. Also, note that samba accesses the windows machine by IP address, not the computer name, as is typical with Windows.

5. Type: "mount –a"to re-run the fstab file. You should then be able to browse to /mnt/servername and see the desired target from the MindTouch VM.

You can now modify the backup_script file created here to back up your wiki directly to the Windows computer.