---------------------------------------------------------------
--
--	README file for gnetmount 0.1.0
--
---------------------------------------------------------------

Description:

    Gnetmount is a Gtk+ 2 program that can mount or un-mount
    network file systems, removable media, or any other type
    of file systems.


Why:

    - I wanted to create a GUI program that would allow users to
    easily mount or un-mount network file systems that require
    authentication (specifically smbfs and cifs). Giving multiple
    users on a common workstation access to a remote smbfs server
    is tricky. You can give them all access throught the same
    account and password by setting a "credentials" option
    in the file system's /etc/fstab entry, in which case you
    need to put the username and password in plain text.

    However, because smbmount and mount.cifs can also authenticate
    with $USER and $PASSWD environment variables, gnetmount allows
    multiple users to access a given smb share with THEIR OWN
    credentials. The user is prompted for credentials when attempting
    to mount a smbfs or cifs share that requires authentication, and
    gnetmount will mount the share using smbmount or mount.cifs as
    the back end by setting the $USER and $PASSWD environment variables
    to the authentication credentials provided by the user while doing
    the mounting.

    Also, users can only mount smbfs or cifs shares onto directories
    that they own. If multiple users share a common workstation,
    this becomes complicated. Gnetmount overcomes this complication
    by automatically changing the owner of the mount point directory
    to the user running gnetmount when a user attempts to mount a
    smbfs or cifs file system. ***Note, in order for this to work,
    all users who use gnetmount need to have write permissions to the
    parent directory of any smbfs or cifs mount point directories.
    I recommend creating a /mnt/gnm directory, creating a group
    with rwx access to this directory, and specifying all smbfs or cifs
    directories as a subdirectory of /mnt/gnm (e.g., /mnt/gnm/share1 ).


License:

    Gnetmount may be used, modified, and redistributed under the
    terms of the GNU General Public License, versions 2 or later.
    Please see the Included LICENSE file for details. 
    
    All documentation included with gnetmount may be used, modified, 
    and redistributed under the terms of the 
    GNU Free Documentation License.

    See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html for details.


Acknowledgements:

    Thanks to Jacob Robbins for looking over some of my code and
    giving me some advice on system calls for process management.


Dependencies:

    Gnetmount 0.1.x requires python >= 2.2 (2.3 or later recommended),
    Gtk+ >= 2.4, pygtk >= 2.4.


Documentation:

    Gnetmount 0.1.x releases use a single executable file, gnetmount,
    which is a python script. The script reads information on
    available file systems from /etc/fstab by default, and contains 
    some default configuration for which types of file systems 
    found in fstab should be included or excluded for mounting/umount
    through gnetmount.

    For example, while /etc/fstab may have entries for various file
    systems on a hard disk drive (such as ext3, reiserfs, xfs, etc.),
    gnetmount is configured by default to only manipulate file systems
    of the following types:

	    smbfs, cifs, nfs, and iso9660 

    Additionally, device '/dev/fd0' will be included among the file
    systems that can be mounted or un-mounted, regardless of the
    associated file system type in fstab, if an entry for this device 
    is included in fstab.

    The default configuration can be modified in the Defaults class
    in gnetmount, and there is also a supplied configuration file
    gnetmount.conf, for customizing the configuration. The configuration
    can be customized on a system-wide or per-user basis by either
    placing the configuration file in a system-wide location or in
    users' home directories. Specifically, gnetmount searches for
    custom configuration in the following locations:

            $HOME/.gnetmount.conf
	    /etc/gnetmount/gnetmount.conf
	    /usr/local/etc/gnetmount/gnetmount.conf

    The first file discovered will be used to override the default
    settings. For more information about the available settings 
    (there are only a few), read the comments in gnetmount.conf.
    So to override the default configuration settings, copy
    gnetmount.conf to one of the above locations and edit it.

    You should put the "gnetmount" file (the python executable)
    somewhere included in your users' $PATH. I recommend
    /usr/local/bin.

    To mount a certain file system in gnetmount, simply highlight the
    desired file system in the table and click on the toggle-button
    in the lower-right corner of the main gnetmount window. When the
    button is toggled and the center is lit-up green, the file system
    is mounted. To un-mount the file system, simply press the toggle
    button again.

    The "Status" column in the table will display an icon with a
    connected socket plug if the file system is mounted and a
    disconnected socket plug if the file system is not mounted.