Installing Samba Server

Posted Thursday, 04 March 2010 at 03:31 by Andrew Liu
Tagged: linux | networking | web development
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OS: Fedora 10

Accessing a your server's filesystem directly from your windows computer can be achieved by using Samba.  Samba has been around for quite a while, and does the job admirably.  First thing we need is to install the packages.

1. Install Samba

2. Basic Configuration

Once installed, we have configuration files located in "/etc/samba".  The file we want to modify "/etc/samba/smb.conf".

a) The "workgroup" / "server string" lines are equivalent to windows workgroup and computer description.  You should fill these out the workgroup to be the same on all your computers in your LAN.  Server string is just a short description.

b) "netbios name" is like "computer name" in windows, and it applies to the network only.  I think by default it uses your /etc/hostname already, but if you have a preferred computer name, different to your hostname, you should put it in here.  Otherwise, leave it commented out.

You can leave "interfaces" and "hosts allow" commented out.  This will allow anyone to access samba.

3. Creating a super public folder

I tend to like having a globally accessible folder over samba.  It just makes things less complicated.  Unless you have good reason to do otherwise, I suggest doing the same.

To do this, I create a user called "samba".  The public folder will be located in this users home directory, called "public".

And now we need to add this folder to the samba configuration file.  Add your shares at the bottom as this is the most logical place to put them.

Finally, we need to add a user to samba.  Samba uses its own method to authenticate users and passwords.  By using "tdbsam" (which is the default now), we simple add a user using the following command.

Remember, this password is different to the operating system password (although you can choose the same password if you wish).  It is this password that samba uses and will look for.

4.Restart

Restart samba services.  Its a little bit more annoying now as you have to do two commands.

To keep things neat, I like to make a symbolic link on the filesystem from "/public" to the newly created super public folder.

5. Startup Scripts

To make sure that samba starts when the system boots up, you need to add the services to the appropriate runlevels.

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