topic title: Connectshares User Guide
Posts: 1,028
SamK
Joined: 21 Aug 2011
#1
Attached is a user guide for Connectshares which was introduced in antiX-13. Download it, uncompress it and view it in your browser. I prefer the look in Iceweasel, but Dillo works OK also. The differences in look are cosmetic.

Connectshares cherry-picks the best features of SMBNetFS and pyNeighborhood and also adds some features neither of them provide.

SMBNetFS
Likes
  • Works in CLI (no X) and GUI environments
  • Can be scripted to automatically run at system startup
  • Local mounting of remote share does not require root password
  • Local unmounting of remote share does not require root password
  • Can optionally be configured to automatically send user credentials to remote server
Dislikes
  • Configuration, management and report via CLI only, no GUI interface
  • No visual representation of remote shares published on the LAN
  • Cannot unmount one of multiple shares as they are all mounted under a common mountpoint
  • Upload speeds are slow (see below for speed comparison)
  • Does not work with NFS shares (exports)
pyNeighborhood
Likes
  • Configuration, management and report via GUI
  • Visual representation of remote shares published on the LAN
  • Can optionally be configured to automatically send user credentials to remote server
  • Can unmount one of multiple shares
  • Upload speeds are fast (see below for speed comparison)
Dislikes
  • Works only in GUI environments
  • Cannot be scripted to automatically run at system startup
  • Cannot mount multiple shares simultaneously, only individually
  • Local mounting of remote share requires root password
  • Local unmounting of remote share requires root password
  • Does not work with NFS shares (exports)
Connectshares
  • Works in CLI (no X) and GUI environments
  • Configuration, management and report via GUI
  • Visual representation of remote shares published on the LAN
  • Can be scripted to automatically run at system startup
  • Can mount multiple shares simultaneously
  • Local mounting of remote share does not require root password
  • Local unmounting of remote share does not require root password
  • Can optionally be configured to automatically send user credentials to remote server
  • Can unmount one of multiple shares
  • Mounting and unmounting of shares can be done via desktop shortcuts
  • Upload speeds are fast (see below for speed comparison)
  • Works with Windows/Samba shares and NFS shares (exports)
  • Does not require entries in fstab
  • Mounting shares or exports may optionally be disabled without access to files owned by root
  • Tiny amount of storage space used by Connectshares and related files
Speed Comparison SMBNetFS v Standard Mount
Create 250MB file from local system on remote share
Note: Before each test, share unmounted and remounted to eliminate caching
Demonstrates an increase in speed of over 2x via standard mount

SMBNetFS

Code: Select all

time dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/SMBNetFS-mountpoint-of-share/testfile bs=16k count=16k

16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 54.0577 s, 5.0 MB/s

real 0m54.165s
user 0m0.176s
sys 0m2.448s
Speed=5.0 MB/s

Standard Mount

Code: Select all

time dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/standard-mountpoint-of-share/testfile bs=16k count=16k

16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 23.6811 s, 11.3 MB/s

real 0m23.690s
user 0m0.052s
sys 0m2.988s
Speed=11.3 MB/s