title: Link to samba shares in html
body: <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>