CIFS on linux with Samba

[trakhan]

Hi.
Is there a way to setup Alfresco alongside SAMBA server running on linux? The problem is, that we will be installing Alfresco on existing linux server, which is used as a File server (with use of samba) and we would like to allow users to add content from windows the easiest way possible (which is with the use of Alfresco CIFS).

Any idea how to setup such an environment?

Thanks for answers …

[pmonks]

To allow two CIFS servers to run on the same machine you'll need to move one of them to a non-standard port, so that they don't conflict.  For Alfresco, this is controlled via the following properties (which should be added to ${ALFRESCO_HOME}/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco-global.properties):

cifs.tcpipSMB.port=1445
cifs.netBIOSSMB.namePort=1137
cifs.netBIOSSMB.datagramPort=1138
cifs.netBIOSSMB.sessionPort=1139‍‍‍‍

(I've added 1000 to each of the default CIFS port numbers - of course you may choose whichever ports you wish)

Now that said, because of limitations in some CIFS clients (notably the one built into Microsoft Windows), moving a CIFS server to non-standard ports basically makes it unavailable to those clients, as it is not possible to configure them to connect to those non-standard ports.  For this reason running two CIFS servers on the same machine is not very common.

You may be able to work around this via DFS [1] - basically having Samba act as the "front end" to both the Samba shares and the Alfresco share.

Cheers,
Peter

[1] http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/msdfs.html