How to Access Windows Shared folders In Ubuntu via LAN
| 10 comments ]

This tutorial explains how to access windows shared folders in ubuntu on a local area network.An easy way to to this is by going to places->Network and browsing to your computer and then accessing the files, incase that doesnt work, then you need to follow this
NOTE:Firstly, ensure that you have file sharing enabled in your windows machine and ensure that the two pcs i.e. the ubntu and the windows machine are able to ping each other. You can do this by typing ping x.x.x.x in the terminal or command prompt where x.x.x.x is the ip address of the machine name to want to communicate with.To find the ip address of the machine on a LAN you need to type ifconfig in ubuntu terminal or ipconfig in windows command prompt.Typically ip address' would be of type 192.168.1.x or 192.168.0.x ..
Once you know the above info.You may proceed with these steps

Step 1 : Go to Places->Computer

Step 2 : The nautilus window should now pop up.
Step 3 : Now under "Go to" type smb://x.x.x.x where x.x.x.x is the ip address or the machine name of the windows machine which contains the shared folders and hit ENTER.As said earlier you can find that information by typing ipconfig in the command prompt of windows machine(eg 192.168.1.3)

Step 4 : Now you should be asked for a username and password, enter the appropriate username and password which is typically the windows login username and password.Or any other special account you setup.
Step 5 : Now you should able to see the shared files and folders

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10 comments

Anonymous said... @ January 16, 2009 at 10:44 AM

Thankyou so much for this!!!! i have been looking all over for about 8 hours and nothing was working for my computers, this worked perfectly THANKYOU!

Anonymous said... @ January 18, 2009 at 7:57 AM

How do we make that a permanent arrangement though?

Thanks.

Anonymous said... @ January 19, 2009 at 2:08 AM

Permanent as in?? Sorry i didnt get you!!

Anonymous said... @ February 13, 2009 at 12:31 PM

Prash - I think he means so that you connect to the Win folder each time you log in to ubuntu after a reboot. Also, anyway to do this if the PC's use DHCP? Great tip and thanks

Anonymous said... @ February 14, 2009 at 6:15 AM

you could use the hostname in that case.
if you want to make it permanent then you could add it in the fstab file . so that it would mount automatically

matthew said... @ May 29, 2009 at 1:56 AM

I was looking for this for information for hours, at school they only have windows computers and I needed to transfer over 4gigs (That cannot be written as a single file on usb drives) and I had to do this. Took me a long time to try and hack it. Thanks for posting.

Unknown said... @ May 30, 2009 at 10:43 PM

I can ping from my windows machine but not from ubuntu and I can see ubuntu shared folder on my windows machine. What should I do so that I can ping from Ubuntu to Windows.

Prash Babu said... @ May 31, 2009 at 7:14 AM

check your windows firewall settings , its mostly blocking requests from your ubuntu machine..

Panamint Joe said... @ October 29, 2009 at 1:38 PM

Ranjit said... @ May 30, 2009 10:43 PM
"I can ping from my windows machine but not from ubuntu and I can see ubuntu shared folder on my windows machine. What should I do so that I can ping from Ubuntu to Windows."

It seems that the Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw) is conflicting with Windows Networking, a condition that has existed for some time in Ubuntu, and nothing has been done to fix it. I get the feeling that no one KNOWS how to fix it. The problem started for me after the first time I ran the ufw command from a terminal prompt, and I can't get Samba to connect to Windows machines automatically since then. Since I'm unwilling to scrub the hard drive and start over, I found that the following works.

1. After the machine has booted and you're in the Gnome GUI environment, open a terminal window.
2. At the command prompt, type "sudo /usr/sbin/ufw disable", or just "sudo ufw", omitting the quotation marks. (You may need to supply the password to execute this root command.)
3. At the command prompt, type "sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart", omitting the quotation marks.

Even though ufw will report that it is disabled and won't restart during the next reboot, it apparently lies and runs anyway, or something else is setting the firewall permissions during boot that prevents Samba from talking to Windows machines. There are a variety of GUI utilities for managing the firewall, both for Gnome and K Desktop, but they don't seem to be able to fix whatever ufw has messed up. So far, the only thing I've been able to find that fixes it in Ubuntu 8.10, albeit temporarily, for the current session only, is running "ufw disable" and restarting the Samba daemon.

It would be nice to be able to execute the two commands described above automatically with a script in the /etc/init.d directory every time Ubuntu starts, but I haven't been able to get it to work yet. This would be suitable workaround until someone figures out why ufw is so screwed up.

Anonymous said... @ January 26, 2011 at 1:39 AM

At the command prompt,type "sudo /usr/sbin/ufw disable"
Hey it worked on my machine. Now I can browse all shared folders on my Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Thnka a lot, dear Prash!
Ned , Columbus, OH

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