Quick guide to setting up SMB shares
Setting up SMB shares is fairly easy, but I do it so infrequently I often forget the steps and need to look them up anyway. So I made myself two sets of smb config files for quickly setting up shares, either public or with a login required.
Table of Contents
Why SMB shares?
My personal use case is that my main home server, which doubles as a NAS, is a Linux machine and holds copies of most of my important data — but I access them from my PC and laptop, both of which use Windows 10. After several years of using SMB at home (and I need to stress this is for home use only and probably completely insecure and/or inadequate for enterprise networks) I have settled on two templates for smb.conf, the Samba configuration file. Below are the files.
This guide assumes Samba is installed and ready to go. If necessary, see this post about setting up Samba.
SMB config file for public share
To set up a “public” share available to anyone on the network without a login prompt, I first set up a user with sudo adduser public (give it any password, it won’t be used anyway) and then give that user’s home directory read/write permissions with sudo chmod ugo+rw /home/public.
Here is the file contents of my smb.conf:
[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
server string = Samba %v %h
strict allocate = Yes
allocation roundup size = 4096
read raw = Yes
server signing = No
write raw = Yes
strict locking = No
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_RCVBUF=131072 SO_SNDBUF=131072
min receivefile size = 16384
use sendfile = Yes
aio read size = 16384
aio write size = 16384
[public]
comment = Public Samba Share
path = /home/public
browseable = yes
writeable = yes
read only = no
public = yes
guest only = yes
force user = public
force group = public
force create mode = 0666
force directory mode = 0777
Always double-check that your config file’s syntax is correct with testparm. For any changes to the config file to take effect, restart Samba services with sudo systemctl restart smbd nmbd.
From Windows, opening Run and going to //hostname/public (or via IP address if you prefer) should open the folder without prompting for a login. However, any machine on the network can access this share and read/write/delete without limitation.
SMB config file for private share with login
When requiring a user login, I usually share out a folder in my home directory and give it the right owner and permissions.
mkdir /home/ariel/share
chown -R ariel /home/ariel/share
chgrp -R ariel /home/ariel/share
chmod -R 660 /home/ariel/share
Then add the user to Samba (be sure to use sudo or do it as root):
sudo smbpasswd -a ariel
Here is the file contents of my smb.conf:
[global]
security = user
workgroup = WORKGROUP
server string = Samba %v %h
netbios name = hostname
log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log
max log size = 50
printcap name = /dev/null
load printers = no
strict allocate = Yes
allocation roundup size = 4096
read raw = Yes
server signing = No
write raw = Yes
strict locking = No
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_RCVBUF=131072 SO_SNDBUF=131072
min receivefile size = 16384
use sendfile = Yes
aio read size = 16384
aio write size = 16384
[share]
comment = Samba Share
path = /home/ariel/share
browseable = yes
writeable = yes
read only = no
As always check the file’s syntax testparm and restart Samba services with sudo systemctl smbd nmbd for the new file parameters to take effect.
From Windows, opening Run and going to //hostname/public (or via IP) should prompt for a login, with it only accepting the user ariel and SMB password you set, after which the folder opens. Only logging in under this user allows writing to the share.