Linux client samba share

How to share files with Samba

Samba provides easy, flexible, cross-platform, and open source collaboration across your organization.

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The Samba project provides file sharing and print services for computers on a network. It uses the Server Message Block and Common Internet File System (SMB/CIFS) protocol, so the services created by running Samba are available to Linux, macOS, and Windows clients. It’s an essential service to run in organizations that support multiple operating systems, and it’s even useful on homogenous networks.

It’s not difficult to set up, and all you need is at least one server you want to designate as a file-share host (it doesn’t have to be rack mounted and could even be a dedicated workstation). For client access, Samba is either built into the operating system or easily installed from a repository.

Install Samba

On your designated Samba server, install the Samba package:

This command also installs the samba-common-tools and samba-libs packages.

Next, start the SMB and NMB daemons. The SMB daemon manages most Samba services, while the NMB daemon provides NetBIOS services. Here are the commands:

$ systemctl enable --now smb $ systemctl enable --now nmb

That’s the installation. All that’s left is a little configuration.

Configure your firewall

Make sure that your file-share server is accessible over your network by adding the samba service to your firewall config:

$ sudo systemctl enable --now firewalld $ sudo firewall-cmd --list-services cockpit dhcpv6-client ssh $ sudo firewall-cmd --add-service samba success

Configure Samba

Create a directory on the server to hold your shared files and folders, and change the SELinux context to samba_share_t :

$ sudo mkdir /sambashare $ sudo chcon -t samba_share_t /sambashare/

To configure shares and users, edit the /etc/samba/smb.conf file. The default file has several good examples of common options, including provisions for shared printers and home directories.

There’s a global section, which defines a workgroup. I arbitrarily set mine to SAMBA . I have no other existing workgroups on my network, so the workgroup hardly matters for my setup. If your organization has a specific workgroup structure, then follow that.

[global] workgroup = SAMBA security = user passdb backend = tdbsam . 

By default, your Samba server’s NetBIOS name is the server’s Linux hostname. If you don’t have DNS configured on your local network, you can use the server’s IP address when contacting the Samba server.

[ Download the Linux networking cheat sheet to get a list of Linux utilities and commands for managing servers and networks. ]

Create a shared location

To create a new share location, add a section to the /etc/samba/smb.conf configuration file with these two definitions:

[sambashare] path = /sambashare read only = No

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Mounting and mapping shares between Windows and Linux with Samba

Create an air of interoperability in your network with Samba. Your Windows and Linux systems can work together.

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In my previous article, Interoperability: Getting started with Samba, I covered installing and configuring Samba shares on a Linux server. The real power of Samba comes when Windows clients can communicate with Linux file servers. In this article, I will cover how you can access Samba shares from both Linux and Windows clients.

Install the Samba client packages

To access Samba share from Linux clients we need to install a few Samba client packages.

On the client machine, install the samba-common and samba-client packages.

# yum install samba-client samba-common -y

Check for available shares

Let’s check if we can access our shares from the server. We can use either the hostname or ip address of the server. If you use the hostname , make sure DNS is working.

# smbclient -U user -L 192.168.1.122 Enter SAMBA\user's password: Sharename Type Comment --------- ---- ------- print$ Disk Printer Drivers myshare Disk my share IPC$ IPC IPC Service (Samba 4.9.1) user Disk Home Directories Reconnecting with SMB1 for workgroup listing. Server Comment --------- ------- Workgroup Master --------- ------- SAMBA SAMBA-SERVER

Create a directory that we can use as our mount point. I’m going to create a directory under /mnt , but you can use any directory you would like to. You may need to configure SELinux on that directory.

# mount -t cifs -o username=user //192.168.1.122/myshare /mnt/share Password for user@//192.168.1.122/myshare: ********

Now that we’ve mounted our share, we can check the mounts with the following command:

Let’s make that directory mount persistently so it can withstand a reboot. Using the text editor of your choice, edit the /etc/fstab file. You can do this in multiple ways, but I’m going to demonstrate two ways to mount the Samba share at boot in /etc/fstab .

The first option provides a username and password for the Samba user in the fstab .

//192.168.1.122/myshare /mnt/share cifs username=user,password=password,_netdev 0 0

The other option is to create a credential file. You can call this file anything, but I would like to call it cred . I would like to place credentials files in the home directory of the user. In our demonstration it will be /home/user/.cred .

//192.168.1.122/myshare /mnt/share cifs credentials=/home/user/.cred,_netdev 0 0

The _netdev option is important since we are mounting a network device. Clients may hang during the boot process if the system encounters any difficulties with the network.

Now create that .cred file inside the user’s home directory.

Next, add the Samba user’s username and password.

username=user password=password

Finally, mount all filesystems.

Access a share from a Windows client

I will be using Windows 10 as my client machine with a workgroup called SAMBA . We need to create a local user account on the Windows machine that matches the username and password of the Samba user account we created in my previous article. Although account creation is not necessary, this will make things simpler when accessing the share.

Like I mentioned above, this step is optional and you can skip it completely. Although there are multiple approaches to adding a new local user on a Windows machine, for the simplicity of this article I will be using PowerShell. Launch PowerShell as an administrator and issue following commands:

PS > $password = Read-Host -AsSecureString PS > New-LocalUser -Name “user” -Password $password

Now that we have created a new local user account matching the Samba user account, we can log in to Windows with our newly created user account.

Access a share from Windows Explorer

To access the Samba share from Windows Explorer, start typing the IP address to our share in the search area. I am using the hostname of the Samba server. In my case, it is centos . You can also access the share by using the IP address of the Samba server.

You might be prompted to enter the username and password to access the share if you skipped the local user creation process. If you get prompted for credentials, enter the Samba username and password we created in the previous article.

You will need to enter the Samba share path every time you want to access the share. There is a better way to access the share by mapping a drive to Samba share in Windows.

Mapping a drive to a Samba share

To map a drive to the Samba share, open PowerShell and issue following command:

PS > NET USE M: \\centos\myshare

Accessing a Samba share on Linux and Windows is easy. With this basic setup, you will be able to access file shares from client machines in your network. With somewhat more configuration, you can deploy Samba shares in a domain environment. Samba can do more than file share. If you would like to learn more about Samba, read this article about Windows and Linux interoperability. This is a basic set up, but you can do so much more with Samba.

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