A Portal to a Portal

Back with WebSphere Portlet Factory on Ubuntu again, as per my earlier post - this time around, the installation was far more smooth. I simply downloaded  Eclipse 3.3.2 from here, and installed it in my user's home directory ( /home/hayd/eclipse ). I then installed WPF into the same directory structure ( /home/hayd/WDF ) and pointed the installer at the Eclipse location.

I'm now trying to get WPF to work with WebSphere Portal 6.1.0.1 beta, which is running in a SuSE VMware image on the same box.

Therefore, I need to map a virtual drive from my host Ubuntu OS to my guest SuSE VM. I ended up using Samba to facilitate this ( although I could have used NFS which would be a more Unix-friendly approach ).

In short, I needed to set up Samba to share the /opt folder from SuSE ( this is the directory structure within which WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal are installed ). I chose to do this as root (!) so added the following to /etc/samba/smb.conf: -

[WAS]
path = /opt
write list = root
browseable = yes
read only = no

However, before I could go any further, I needed to install the Samba client software onto Ubuntu using the following command: -

sudo aptitude install -y smbfs

( although I could have also used Synaptic Package Manager or similar ).

I then "simply" mounted the Samba share from Ubuntu using the command: -

sudo mount -t smbfs //172.16.17.132/WAS /mnt/was -o username=root,rw

Once I'd entered my root password (!), I was good to go.

With thanks to a couple of other sites: -

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-213703.html

and: -

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=255872&highlight=mounting+shares

Ubuntu - it actually rocks :-)