for a lan im helping a guy configure weve got a 180gb file server running win xp pro. i would like to be able to access that using my linux webserver. afai can tell, samba is used only for doing the opposite of what i want. how do i mount a directory on the fileserver from linux. (xp is ntfs, right?)
ie. 'mount -t ntfs 192.168.1.123\shared_folder /home/customsex/fileserver' is what i would want to happen, but i know thats not how to do it. just a way of showing what i want better, i guess. any help would be greatly appreciated.

Samba is what you want, it can do exactly that as well.

Take a look here for details.

Basically, it would be:

mount -t smbfs -o username=USER,password=PASS //server/share /path/to/mount-point

Of course, you can leave out the -o and accompanying switches if you don't need a username and password.

thanks for the quick response. another question. when i only have one nic in my linux box it performs as desired and as expected. its got an ip that is not a local, which is good. now, i also run a counter-strike server on this box. i thought it would be a good idea to throw another nic in and have it run on the lan also. that way people dont have to search for the server in the long list of internet servers, it would just pop up under lan servers. i plug in the new nic, configure it. it grabs an ip from my dhcp server, and the outside ip stops working. people from the outside cant connect to the box anymore. a quick check shows that all internet traffic is now routed through the lan, which doesnt work for me. is there something i need to do that will specify to only use eth1(eth1 being the newly added nic) for local traffic?

That would be routing. You'll need to change your default route back to eth0 and add a route for the local network, routed through eth1. Post the output of "route" and lets see what you have now.

[root@63 root]# route

Kernel IP routing table

Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface

63.166.59.112   *               255.255.255.240 U     0      0        0 eth0

192.168.1.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth1

127.0.0.0       *               255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 lo

default         192.168.1.1     0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth1

default                         0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

can i change the routing easily in linuxconf?

Yes, you can do it in Linuxconf. It is under Networking > Client Tasks > Routing and gateways. You'll want to set the default route to the eth0 card, and set a route to your local (192.168.1.x) network. Linuxconf might get confused, though.

You have two default routes at the moment, and that just doesn't work

You can remove the default route to 192.168.1.1 by doing:

route del default 192.168.1.1 eth1

Then add the route, with gateway, to your local network, through eth1:

route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 192.168.1.1 eth1

All should be well after that.

thanks. seems to be working. but only time will tell. now to play with the samba

No problem. You can PayPal me $20.

heh