Samba on Linux the Easy Way

It’s an entertaining way of writing, but please don’t do any of the port forwarding stuff mentioned towards the end. I can’t imagine any scenario where I’d want to have a Samba share exposed to the internet. If you need remote access to a local shared folder, use a VPN.

Now the same person should write a “wireguard on Linux — the easy way”. (Which would probably be — use tailscale)

Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way

#5

Post by xrd » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 6:10 AM UTC

whateveracct wrote: post #3

I love NixOS for this. It's a few lines of Nix config to set up samba sharing for a directory + a .local domain for discoverability.

Can you share a link?

Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way

#6

Post by loxias » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 6:30 AM UTC

Entertaining writing, but also a bunch of fluff I don't see the point of?

It's not like setting up a share is hard, I'm missing the point of why something that's already easy would need an "easy way".

Now, Samba as an AD DC, across multiple sites, integrating with Kerberos and LDAP, so that users can have a single sign on experience across platforms... That, I'd be impressed at an "easy way" guide. ;-)

I think I'm not the target audience.

Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way

#7

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 7:06 AM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #4

It’s an entertaining way of writing, but please don’t do any of the port forwarding stuff mentioned towards the end. I can’t imagine any scenario where I’d want to have a Samba share exposed to the internet. If you need remote access to a local shared folder, use a VPN. Now the same person should write a “wireguard on Linux — the easy way”. (Which would probably be — use tailscale)

[deleted]

Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way

#8

Post by johnchristopher » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 7:18 AM UTC

I have given up on Samba on my home network. It's just 2 pi, 2 laptops but client randomly loses connection to folders or dolphin/nautilus stop seeing folders, hit refresh, there it is again, etc.

I just use sshfs and I am done with it.

I just want to easily move files around my network and samba took too many hours of my life to look at what's wrong this year with client version or spaces in shared folders. It's always something.

Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way

#9

Post by legal_penguin » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 7:29 AM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #8

I have given up on Samba on my home network. It's just 2 pi, 2 laptops but client randomly loses connection to folders or dolphin/nautilus stop seeing folders, hit refresh, there it is again, etc. I just use sshfs and I am done with it. I just want to easily move files around my network and samba took too many hours of my life to look at what's wrong this year with client version or spaces in shared folders. It's alw…

I took the time to debug all the Samba issues between my Pis and Linux + Windows desktop computers. Most of the time there are two separate problems:

1. Samba share is not discovered in the network. All my problems were gone after installing wsdd2.

2. Permissions. Especially Windows clients implicitly try to login with an empty password to check if the share can accessed without one. This can lead to problems with the "map to guest" directive in the Samba configuration. Also the Windows credential storage sometimes saves passwords that did not work and implicitly tries to login.

But don't get me started on the Gnome/gvfs client implementation of Samba. I have given up on that.

- https://bugs.launchpad.net/gvfs/+bug/1828107

- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gvfs/-/issues/307

I put together a small writeup in case someone wants to take a deep-dive: https://blog.hiebl.cc/posts/why-your-samba-config-does-not-w...

Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way

#10

Post by donatj » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 7:32 AM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #8

I have given up on Samba on my home network. It's just 2 pi, 2 laptops but client randomly loses connection to folders or dolphin/nautilus stop seeing folders, hit refresh, there it is again, etc. I just use sshfs and I am done with it. I just want to easily move files around my network and samba took too many hours of my life to look at what's wrong this year with client version or spaces in shared folders. It's alw…

I came here to say roughly the same thing. I really just use sftp these days.

For years I used Avahi to run afp shares on my Linux machines for my Macs, but I don’t even bother anymore. I have ssh setup on all my computers, it’s all I really need. Sometimes I’ll mount it, but 90% of the time I just scp over the file I want.