Getting Samba to work

[davidgonterman]

Hey there people. How are things?

I had some spare computer parts and decided to combine them to form a file server for my computers. For backups and cloud computing.

I got Ubuntu Server installed.
I got it to mount two of my shares (/media/Disk1 and /media/Disk2) automatically at boot-up
I got it so I can remotely control the terminal from Windows 10, so I won't need a screen for my server.

And now I got Samba installed and running.

Now the problem: How to get a public Samba share set up so I can access it from Windows 10? While I know my way around the Unix terminal, judging by how I got this far, I'll need a bit of help with Samba.

Any assistance here will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Morbius1]

[1] Make sure samba is installed:

sudo apt install samba

[2] Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and at the bottom of the file add this:

[Disk1]
path = /media/Disk1
read only = no
guest ok = yes

[3] Save smb.conf and restart smbd:

sudo service smbd restart

[4] Now run this command:

hostname

On the Win10 machine open explorer and enter the network path to that share substituting hostname with the one from step [4] and adding a .local at the end:

\\hostname.local\Disk1

The ability of the Win10 client to actually write to that share depends on the Linux permissions of /media/Disk1. If it's owned by root with read only access to everyone else you will not be able to write for example. If it's owned by a user on the server and since this is a public share you can use something like a "force user" in the share definition.

Notes on the state of Samba and SMBv1:

Win10 disables SMBv1 on the client ( and server ) side and host discovery by NetBIOS name doesn't work without it. What that means is that when you go to Explorer > Network it will never be able to see your Linux server. You can still access the server but it has to be done explicitly:

Either by ip address: \\192.168.0.X
Or as we did earlier by it's mDNS hostname: \\hostname.local

There is another way using WS-Discovery which Win10 itself uses but that takes a bit to set up.