You know how it works: "make it work first, then make it better". I restarted toying with LUA to write a little configuration editor for Windows shares, making creation of share DOSDrivers files really quick and easy, but I wasn't satisfied at all. The first version only put them in Devs/DOSDrivers but you had to mount them by hand and, by the way, move them to SYS:WBStartup to make their volume icons appear on the desktop at startup. That was a quite surprising behavior, but friend AmigaSystem gave me a good explanation on Aros-Exec: activating everything from DOSDrivers at startup would have given issues with slow networks (although I wonder why you should have a Windows share over something different than a LAN, at least at home), while using WBStartup after the GUI has loaded gives more time to connection. And that's OK. Anyway, I needed to find a good name for my SMB-oriented tool and, since Samba had been already taken for a while, I ended up calling it... SiMBa, with capital SMB letters. It will live into Icaros Desktop's Tools directory until AROS' Prefs/Network tool will get a proper update to support also SMB2/3 shares. Please notice that SiMBa is not a network manager, nor an editor: it cannot remove, delete or modify device files, but it just creates them. You will still have to move, edit or delete them whenever you need it with Wanderer, Magellan or the shell. Supported options allow to make a share only readable (for security reasons) or auto-mounting at startup, with the share being mounted and shown right after its creation (if you have set it up correctly, obviously), even when starting AROS from the DVD drive. In this case, however, the share will be only temporary and will vanish at the first reboot.
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| "WinDiskD" and "test_share" are actual Windows shares from a Windows 11 computer. SiMBa lets you choose a nickname (AROS Label) for them, but you can get the usual IP:Share naming convention if you leave the field empty. System booted from DVD-ROM. |
