Ground Control

I'm not an expert on Samba but I can get it working which is what matters really, and this is where we use the command line. There are GUIs available but being honest the command line options are so easy and so quick and it gives you an idea of what you have to do.

The first thing we need to do is open up a terminal session and then type in the windows

SU followed by return and then enter the root password.

No we add the user you are logged in as into Samba, we do that with the command smbpasswd.

Assume that you login as somebody called eric with a password of hellothere, add the command line type smbpasswd -a eric and then press enter, you will then be prompted for a password twice, you can use the same password here. If you get an error message, just do it again as occasionally the samba database stuff doesn't initialise properly.

Now comes the frightening bit, we are going to edit the samba configuration file, this is located in the /etc/samba folder so at the command prompt, type cd /etc/samba

Now we all know that Linux text editors are terrifying to use, but there is a lovely utility called Midnight Commander, you start it by typing mc at the command line and then in the left hand window. Use the arrow keys to scroll down to smb.con and once it's highlighted press F4.

This is what you should get on  the screen, using the arrow keys, move down to the workgroup name and change the word workgroup to the Windows name that you want to call the workgroup this server belongs in, I'm going to call it stafrleet and then remove the # from the netbios name line and type in the windows name for the computer. In this case I'm going to change mine to andromeda.

Once you've done that, press F2 on the keyboard, this will save the file and then F10 to quit the editor. Then press F10 again to leave midnight commander.

We now need to restart the service to ensure that the changes have been picked up, to do this at the command line we type

service smb restart and then press enter, you may get 2 error messages if this is the first time but this should be followe by 2 OK messages.

You now have a basic Windows samba configuration with the home folders for your used shared out across the network.

If you want to share out some other folder then in my opinion, the easiest way is to add an entry to the bottom of the smb.conf file.

[Pictures]
For example, I am going to create a folder called Media off the /mnt folder and in here I'll create another folder called pictures, I now want to share that out across the Windows network. So at the bottom of the smb.conf file I would add the following entry:

path = /mnt/Media/Pictures
public = yes
browseable = yes
writable = yes
create mask = 0775

Public means that evryone can see it, browseable means it shows when you browse the network you can also change public to no and add a line that says:

valid users = user1 user2 group1

Doing that only allows acces to people that have succesfully authenticated on the server, you may have to change the permissions of a shared folder initially if it is anywhere othere than your home folder, you can do that by using the command command chmod 0775 /mnt/Media/Pictures or if you want to change permissions for the contents of the folder you would use chmod 0775 /mnt/Media/Pictures/*