How To Make A Samba Server KISS-Style

For me personally Samba has been the easiest hassle-free way of sharing files over the network. It worked without any kind of complicated setup and allows me to share perfectly-legal movies, music, and even allows me to sync game files and such with ease. Other sites tend to have a rather overcomplicated config setup and generally make things more confusing than they have to. Hopefully this makes it easier. Note I’m not going to go over mounting anything or setting anything other than PAM authentication.

Installing

For this I’m going to assume you’re gonna be using Ubuntu/Ubuntu server, but the installation process should be pretty straightforward either way.

sudo apt install samba

Bam. Its installed.

Configuring

For this I’m going to use a variant of the default Ubuntu config or one that I found online somewhere and modified. Either way its pretty simple and there aren’t a ton of super important things to address. Since I was trying to link multiple hard drives/partitions under a single share I ended up having to put allow insecure wide links in to let symlinks work. If you don’t need it then you should be able to remove it.

In /etc/samba/smb.conf put:

[global]
   workgroup = WORKGROUP
   allow insecure wide links = yes
   server string = %h server
   dns proxy = no
   log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
   max log size = 1000
   syslog = 0
   panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d
   server role = standalone server
   passdb backend = tdbsam
   obey pam restrictions = yes
   unix password sync = yes
   passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u
   passwd chat = *Enter\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *Retype\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *password\supdated\ssuccessfully* .
   pam password change = yes
   map to guest = bad user
   usershare allow guests = yes
[NAMEHERE]
   comment = Stuff
   path = /PATH/HERE
   guest ok = yes
   browseable = yes
   follow symlinks = yes
   wide links = yes

The only things that you need to change are NAMEHERE and /PATH/HERE. Make sure that the path you are setting up already exists and that the user you want to access it with is able to modify it.

Running Samba

Once its configured you need to run two commands to get the service started. On Ubuntu it will automatically set up a systemd service so:

systemctl enable smbd

and

systemctl start smbd

After that it should show up in file-system discovery with Linux systems.

Logging In

This will not be completely accessible without setting up a samba password which is DIFFERENT from your normal password. To set the password for your user simply run smbpasswd and you should be golden.