SAMBA for Home or Small Business
First of all, what is SAMBA? It’s a free File and Print server that can be used in Linux and UNIX based Oss for file and printer sharing with Windows machines.
So now you got the idea. But why use Samba with Ubuntu? First, it is free! When configured, it works smoothly. Less need for worrying about viruses and many more advantages are there.
Here I’m using Ubuntu 12.04 desktop version in a pc with an Atom processor. The main aim is to setup a server which is only used for file/print sharing + backups. So here I’m not worrying about high end hardware. Also here I’m not considering security issues. File and printers are shared so anyone in the network have access to them.
Let’s go!
Auto mounting partitions in Ubuntu
In this machine I have created 4 partitions. First one for OS, second swap space, third for file storage, fourth for file backups. Last 2 partitions are not given mount points. So let’s do something to auto mount them at system startup. For this using pysdm is a good solution. Find how to do this here.
Installing SAMBA
Open a terminal and give the following command to install SAMBA and a gui tool.
sudo apt-get install samba samba-common python-glade2 system-config-samba
File sharing with SAMBA
We can configure either using the GUI tool or editing the smb.config file. Let’s go for the second method. Give the following command in terminal
sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf &
If you wish you may backup this file first. Remove all the current content and add the following to this.
#===============Global Settings=========== [global] workgroup = workgroup server string = DI Server ; netbios name = DI-Server security = share map to guest = bad user dns proxy = no ; encrypt passwords = yes guest ok = yes guest account = di #===============Share Definitions=========== [DI Files] path = /media/sda6/DI-Files browsable = yes writable = yes guest ok = yes read only = no create mask = 0755
In global settings, you may already understand that workgroup is set as “workgroup”. You may change according to the workgroup you use in your network. “netbios name” is the name which you see this server in other machines when shared. Security is set to share. You can set this to user and restrict some access permissions. You may try it later.
Here I’m sharing /media/sda6/DI-Files folder so anyone in the network could have read and write access to that folder.
So you are done. Restart SAMBA services by giving following commands.
sudo restart smbd sudo restart nmbd
Now using a windows machine connected to the network check whether you can access this folder. ( Go and see the workgroup computers)
Great!!! Try copying files and deleting them.
SAMBA GUI Tool
Adding shares can be done easily using the SAMBA GUI tool as. Search for SAMBA application (system-config-samba) and open it.
Now you are done with file sharing.
2 Comments
darshana · June 7, 2013 at 12:36 pm
It’s really worthy article. Thank you sanjboy aiya 😀
Sanjaya · June 7, 2013 at 1:20 pm
Thank you 😀