<p><em>First off if you're unaware, samba or smb == Windows file sharing, \\computer\share etc.</em></p>

<p>I have a bunch of different files on a bunch of different computers. It's mostly media and there is quite a bit of it. I'm looking into various ways of consolidating this into something more manageable.</p>

<p>Currently there are a few options I'm looking at, the <strong>most</strong> insane of which is some kind of samba share indexer that would generate a list of things shared on the various samba servers I tell it about and upload them to a website which could then be searched and browsed.</p>

<p>It's a cheap solution, OK?</p>

<p>Ignoring the fact that the idea is obviously a couple of methods short of a class, do you chaps know of any way to link to samba file shares in html in a cross-browser way? In windows one does \\computer\share, in linux one does smb://computer/share, neither of which work afaik from browsers that aren't also used as file managers (e.g. any browser that isn't Internet Explorer).</p>

<p><strong>Some Clarifications</strong> </p>

<ul>
<li>The computers used to access this website are a mixture of WIndows (XP) and Linux (Ubuntu) with a mixture of browsers (Opera and Firefox).</li>
<li>In linux entering smb://computer/share only seems to work in Nautilus (and presumably Konqueror / Dolphin for you KDE3.5/4 people). It doesn't work in Firefox or Opera (Firefox does nothing, Opera complains the URL is invalid).</li>
<li>I don't have a Windows box handy atm so I'm unsure if \\computer\share works in anything apart from IE (e.g. Firefox / Opera).</li>
<li>If you have a better idea for consolidating a bunch of random samba shares (it certainly can't get much worse than mine ;-)) it's worth knowing that there is no guarantee that any of the servers I would be wanting to index / consolidate would be up at any particular moment. Moreover, I wouldn't want the knowledge of what they have shared lost or hidden just because they weren't available. I would want to know that they share 'foo' but they are currently down.</li>
</ul>

[{'answer_id': 37846, 'author': 'David Webb', 'author_id': 3171, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/3171', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>To make the links work cross platform you could look at the User Agent either in a CGI script or in JavaScript and update your URLs appropriately.</p>\n\n<p>Alternatively, if you want to consolidate SMB shares you could try using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_File_System_(Microsoft)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Microsoft DFS</a> (which also works with Samba).</p>\n\n<p>You set up a DFS root and tell it about all the other SMB/Samba shares you have in your environment.  Clients then connect to the root and see all the shares as if they were hosted on that single root machine; the root silently redirects clients to the correct system when they open a share.</p>\n\n<p>Think of it as like symbolic links or a virtual file system for SMB.</p>\n\n<p>It would solve your browsing problem.  I\'m not sure if it would solve your searching one.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 38258, 'author': 'Mark Brackett', 'author_id': 2199, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2199', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>I\'d probably just setup Apache on the SAMBA servers and let it serve the files via HTTP. That\'d give you a nice autoindex default page too, and you could just wget and concatenate each index for your master list.</p>\n\n<p>A couple of other thoughts:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>file://server/share/file is the defacto Windows way of doing it</li>\n<li>You can <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa767914.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">register protocol handlers</a> in Windows, so you could register smb and redirect it to file://. I\'d suspect GNOME/KDE/etc. would offer the same.</li>\n</ol>\n'}, {'answer_id': 38359, 'author': 'SCdF', 'author_id': 1666, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1666', 'pm_score': 4, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>Hmm, protocol handlers look interesting.</p>\n\n<p>As <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37804/link-to-samba-shares-in-html#38258">Mark</a> said, in Windows protocol handlers can be dealt with at the OS level</p>\n\n<p>Protocol handlers can also be done at the browser level (which is preferred, as it is cross platform and doesn\'t involve installing anything).</p>\n\n<p><a href="http://kb.mozillazine.org/Register_protocol" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Summary of how it works in Firefox</a><br>\n<a href="http://www.opera.com/support/search/view/535/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Summary of how it works in Opera</a></p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/37804', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1666/']