JT's Blog

If you’re not a geek and for some odd reason you regularly look at this blog, you’re probably wondering what on earth that title means.

Translation:  set up a windows 2003 server to share data using methods from UNIX rather than Windows.

Why on earth do such a thing you ask?  Why not use OpenFiler or FreeNas?  Why burden myself with a win2k3 machine?  Well, because it does other stuff too.  That’s why.

Basically, I’ve got a decent sized chunk of disk space for my stuff which now includes VMs (Virtual Machines).  I need my ESX server to be able to save VMs here, but ESX does not speak Windoze.

I had a hell of a time getting SFU working (no, not STFU)  SFU=Services For Unix, which is what allows a windows machine to speak UNIX protocols, like NFS.  Basically, I had no idea what I was doing, and it’s a bit too complicated to just BS your way through it.

Turns out, you have to create user and group mappings, which sounds awfully insecure, but ESX only does root (at least, as of 3.5):
Users:  root –> administrator
group: root –> administrators

Then, surprise, it just works.  I actually found the answer here, in a VMware forum.

Now, if only I didn’t need this machine as a Fax / print server / CIFS file share, I could go 100% linux… except for VirtualCenter.  Darn it.