File sharing without VBox shared folders.

[mpack]

In a recent thread Sasquatch recommended "Samba shares" as a faster alternative to VBox shared folders (the thread involved a user who want to read huge files from the SF).

The extra speed was of course interesting to me so I decided to do some research... and discovered that Samba seems to be a Unix specific tool, and that its purpose is to allow communication with Windows PCs via the "SMB" protocol which is native to Windows - is all this correct so far?

In which case, I'm having a problem finding out what the equivalent recommendation would be when you are using Windows (2K and later) as both guest and host. I'm sure I've seen advice to install NFS on the Windows machine... which doesn't seem to be sensible if SMB is native to Windows.

As you can tell, my knowledge of networking software on any OS is rather poor! Note that I'm not actually trying to do anything at the moment, I just want to know what options are available.

[vbox4me2]

Samba for linux/unix is what file and printer sharing is to windows, windows by default uses some form of netbios todo this but you can bind this to tcpip(*) which makes it really fast, samba can connect to such shares.

(*) To some degree, w2k and higher default to using tcpip, before w2k netbios was the default, as of w95 you can bind and use tcpip for shares. For example removing netbios as protocol forces tcpip and improves share access.

Despite all the black magic of windows I find windows file sharing the fastest file sharing system, provided ofcourse the backend can handle the disk load.

[mpack]

Well thanks for the response, but the details of how to do it are still elusive, and I can't find a decent howto on the subject (and googling for this stuff is really frustrating - lots of verbiage but not much light cast on the subject).

Specifically on the case whether host and guest are running XP: does it require host interface networking? If so, is it possible to set this up on hosts which don't have a physical network card? Suppose they do have a physical network card but the cable is disconnected, what then? Suppose the host is running XP Home - is that a problem? Etc.

[vbox4me2]

http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&sourc ... ring&meta=
Try it and learn, its really easy.

[Perryg]

In a recent thread Sasquatch recommended "Samba shares" as a faster alternative to VBox shared folders (the thread involved a user who want to read huge files from the SF).

The extra speed was of course interesting to me so I decided to do some research... and discovered that Samba seems to be a Unix specific tool, and that its purpose is to allow communication with Windows PCs via the "SMB" protocol which is native to Windows - is all this correct so far?

In which case, I'm having a problem finding out what the equivalent recommendation would be when you are using Windows (2K and later) as both guest and host. I'm sure I've seen advice to install NFS on the Windows machine... which doesn't seem to be sensible if SMB is native to Windows.

As you can tell, my knowledge of networking software on any OS is rather poor! Note that I'm not actually trying to do anything at the moment, I just want to know what options are available.

Here is what works for me.
Windows to Windows share can be accomplished without the VBox share but there are a few requirements.

• 1) they must be in the same subnet.
  2) they must be in the same workgroup.
  3) you must have file share activated.

Then it is a simple matter of connecting the share to the guest or host by mapping. You should be able to use the network manager to attach but I find it faster when mapped. Also the connection media needs to be Bridged or host-only, due to #1 above. You can use NFS, but I do not find it accomplishes anything as far as speed goes. Normal network sharing seems to be enough.

[vbox4me2]

It'll work with NAT as well but VBox nat ain't that great. (Guest->Host only)

[mpack]

Windows to Windows share can be accomplished without the VBox share but there are a few requirements.

• 1) they must be in the same subnet.
  2) they must be in the same workgroup.
  3) you must have file share activated.

I'm still not getting this. Items (2) and (3) are no problem, or at least so I believe. Both PCs are in workgroup "WORKGROUP", the host PC has been given the name "MyDevPC". As a test I enabled sharing of a host folder called "Archive", I also used that as the share name. The "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks" option is ticked in the LAN properties.

I'm not sure how to accomplish item (1). The PC I'm trying this on has a physical NIC but no cable connection, so no dynamically assigned IP address. When configured for host interface networking the guest also doesn't seem to have an IP address until I attempt to map a network folder, after which IPconfig says "Autoconfiguration IP Address: 169.254.241.202". I'm not altogether sure what this is telling me. But, I tried assigning a static IP address on the host of 169.254.241.1, presumably putting both PCs on the same subnet, then I tried to map a network drive using "\\WORKGROUP\Archive" and "\\MyDevPC\Archive" as the share name, both fail. What am I missing? [ one extra note - after assigning a static IP address to the host, ipconfig still doesn't list it, it still just says "Media state - Media Disconnected" for the LAN connection and doesn't list any IP info. ]

Also the connection media needs to be Bridged or host-only, due to #1 above. You can use NFS, but I do not find it accomplishes anything as far as speed goes. Normal network sharing seems to be enough.

What version of Vbox are you using? I'm using 2.1.4 on that PC, and it doesn't offer either "Bridged" or "Host-only" as network options. It does offer "Host Interface Networking", which I assume is what you mean by "bridged". It also offers internal networking which according to the manual is only useful for networking multiple guests together.

[Perryg]

Wow that is old by today's VBox standards.
Host Interface is the new bridged, but you must manually setup the bridge in the host. I have messed around with Internal a bit and it did work as well.
Just so you know I did another test using the Win-to-Win share and Bridged and the throughput was sustained at 100Mbit, due to the NIC I have in this PC, (moved a 2gig file @ just over 1 minute). I found that the PCnet III was about 1/3 to 1/4 of that so the adapter has a lot to do with it as well.
I did not perform these tests on the older versions though so I can not tell you for sure that it will be faster. I will test the host-only later today and let you know.

Now to your mapping problem, you either need to know the name of the PC or the ip address. If you look in my network neighborhood, network places, what ever the version of Windows you are using, you should see the share that you made. Note the name of the PC. Lets say for now that it is called mpack. Then the mapping would be as below.
\\mpack\Archive in the file manager or net use x: \\mpack\Archive -p from command window.
If you do not know the name but you do know the ip address you can substitute the ip address where the name goes.
\\192.169.1.10\Archive or net use x: \\192.168.1.10\Archive

By the way Windows is not case sensitive in the naming so you don't need to worry if that is off.

[vbox4me2]

If you don't have a dedicated editable dns use IP addresses for mapping shares.

[Perryg]

Unless you have NetBIOS turned off you should still see the PC name in a WIndows peer-to-peer even without a DNS entry.
From command window C:\ net view for servers and net user for all pc's or at least I do.

[vbox4me2]

Correct, but... netbios resolution is 50x slower then direct ip access and 20x slower then dns and netbios depends on a browse master which can change every 20 minutes, netbios updates can also lead to an empty table....

[mpack]

Wow that is old by today's VBox standards.

Yep, a whole six months old. I don't normally update software unless I have a specific reason, however just for you I've now upgraded that PC to 3.0.4.

Now to your mapping problem, you either need to know the name of the PC or the ip address. If you look in my network neighborhood, network places, what ever the version of Windows you are using, you should see the share that you made.

I finally got it to work, my thanks for all the help. I first switched to host only networking. That changed the error message from "share name not found" to "you dont have permission" (and the share name appeared in network places). Next I changed the mapping to log in as "Guest" instead of (I think the default is) the client computer name. Error changed from "permissions" to "not enough server resources", which after googling I fixed by increasing the IRPStackSize parameter in the registry of the host.

So far I'm finding that the XP guest sometimes seems to take a long time to decide if it's going to let me access a file - but having done so it then seems quite fast. Not done any benchmarking yet though.

[mpack]

Interesting. Throughout this process I've been thinking in terms of server client. It never occurred to me that the shared folder access could be bidirectional. After I got the XP guest accessing a host shared folder, the next thing that occurred was "Ooh - I have a Win98 guest with no GAs, so no VBox shared folders - can I get this technique to work there too?". And the answer is no, at least not yet, because I seem to have a problem configuring the W98SE guest properly... OTOH the XP host has no problem at all accessing shared folders inside the W98 guest!

This could provide a partial answer to those questions "how can I give the host direct access to guest folders".

[mpack]

[ Win98 guest ] - "... can I get this technique to work there too?". And the answer is no, at least not yet.

It turned out that in order to get network shared folders to work between XP host and Win98 guest I had to create a user account on both host and guest. The account name and password has to be the same on both, and the password cannot be blank. The underlying cause seems to be that W9x assumes you will use the same account name and password for both local and network logins, so there is no "log in with different name" option in the W9x "Map network drive".

Once that was fixed the shares worked perfectly.