Recently I’ve been toying around with the idea of taking the coursera scala course, and naturally this turned into an existential analysis of how best, exactly, to set up my home network file system. You see, I intend to use an IDE (probably intelliJ just to piss of the eclipse holy warriors – black and orange and blue color schemes are better, guys), and X-window forwarding that sucker would make me want to die 1,000 deaths. So I would prefer to edit the files LOCALLY, on my windows laptop, but execute them remotely on my linux desktop dev server… I grieve. This had the added bonus that if I’m going to go through the trouble of doing this for my single windows-to-linux connection, I might as well also do it for my linux-to-linux connection (I have two debian desktops).

Of course, that simple task ended up consuming a solid three hours of my Saturday. It started out simple enough; just take the directory I want to share (/home/username/code) and turn it into a samba share by updating my /etc/samba/smb.conf to include

[code]
comment = Shared code repositories
path = /home/username/code
browsable = yes
guest ok = yes
force group = username
writable = yes
create mask = 0664
force directory mode = 0775

and mounting (in the linux world) of the share in my /etc/fstab file a la

//my.ip.add.ress/code /mnt/code cifs uid=username,credentials=/home/username/.smbfsrc,rw 0 0

Of course, those are the lines that work. The lines I started with were missing the last three of the smb.conf file as well as the uid and rw in the fstab file. If you don’t have those things, linux does this super amazing thing where it will let you mount the file system as user nobody in group nogroup, create files and directories in the mounted directory, but not actually have write access to anything there. Super fun! Can I adequately communicate to you the joy of the following:

$> touch test.txt
$> ls -alh
drwxrwxr-x 12 username username    0 Feb  6 14:57 ./
drwxr-xr-x  3 username username 4.0K Feb  6 13:50 ../
-rw-r--r--  4 nobody   nogroup     0 Feb  6 14:55 test.txt

I see that I cannot.

In any case, it’s done now, and I have effectively spent up all of the time I had intended to spend on scala soo……. better luck next time, me.