Hello all. My first mail message to this group so I hope I follow all expected procedures, and ask what may be seen as a worthy Q What I want to do is to have some detailed accounting of interactions with the windows boxs that have access to a linux drive using samba. Mostly the windows machines don't logon to an account for a user, just a shared location on the linux drive. I want to be able to track and watch file usage, user interaction and general "who did what" with the file system. There are a bunch of shared files on the drive which many users have equal rights to (read and write) and I just want to be able to see who is affecting it and when, so I could generate a log. I hope I can write a nice little script that could gather the information in a meaningful manner. but the "how to get the relavant detail" which I'm finding hard to gather, as a file doesn't seem to give much clue about who touch it last. So my question who be, how do I get accounting details of such a situation. Thanks Shem