Have shared folder — How do I get to it from AIX?

[Michael Lacriola]

I have this shared folder of the format \serverdir1dir2. I can I get to it from an RS6000 by either directly writing to it or by FTP’ing to it.

Topic

[Bakha Nurzhanov]

You will need to have Samba installed or use an intermediary Windows based FTP server (IIS) that will serve out SMB shares via FTP. Write me if you need more details.

[Michael Lacriola]

That’s what I was afraid of. We used samba “once” at that was extremely painful. The vendor I was dealing with basically said that they made it a share, get the files there any way you want. Not very helpful. That already had FTP allowed. Problem was that the setup was defined for something else entirely and I caould not get to the share. So, I created another FTP site through IIS and assigned it a different port number because 21 was already in use (cannot use same port for different sites) and things seem to be working a ok. I thought there was something native to AIX regarding the issue of the shared folder.

Thanks for the reply.

[Glenn Friedenreich]

We’ve used smbclient on AIX for bidirectional PC-based file transfers for several years, and have found it relatively easy to use.  It eliminates the need to have an FTP server set up on the PC.  We primarily use smbclient in ksh scripts for scheduled batch file transfers.

You just need to get the PC server administrator to set up a login/password for smbclient to use and have the appropriate read/write/delete access set up on the PC for that login.

See the AIX manpage ‘man smbclient’ for details.

-Glenn

[Max Drown (Infor)]

We are struggling with this very issue now. We have Cloverleaf installed on AIX, but we have Windows applications that can only transfer PDF files using UNC paths (//path/dir). How are you all handling this sort of interface?

-- Max Drown (Infor)

[Barb Dozier]

We are also using Samba/smbclient to deal with this situation.  We need to move charge files over to our Meditech installation and my admins did not want FTP any where near those servers.  It didn’t take too long to configure things the way we wanted.  So far though in our testing it has been working nicely.

Thanks, Barb

[Max Drown (Infor)]

Could you folks using smbclient describe your configuration including the OS and Cloverleaf, please? 🙂

-- Max Drown (Infor)

[Ed Mastascusa]

we use AIX 5.1 smbclient version 2.25. Our current cl version is 5.3.

Common problems, esp when getting manually created files:

  Getting the end users to set up shares and permissions.

  Users moving, renaming, mis-naming and/or deleting files or even directories.

   The user dragging and dropping a shortcut in the share instead of the actual file.

  There are also some dos/unix differences with case sensitivity, spaces in path names. etc.

[Barb Dozier]

We are running cl 5.4 on AIX 5.3 TL05 with Samba 3.0.23d.  We started down the path of setting up a share on a windows server that was actually a directory on AIX but ran into issues with meditech background jobs accessing files within the share.  So we switched direction and are using the smbclient to access a share on the windows server from AIX.  We have kron jobs schedule to kick off the smbclient commands.  So far in our testing it is working as desired.

Thanks, Barb

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