Configuring Samba for Linux

A Samba file server provides seamless file sharing across different operating system platforms over a network. This beginner guide will cover the setup of Samba on Ubuntu. (Ubuntu does offer an excellent installation and configuration guide for samba.

Step 1: To install Samba, run the following command in Terminal.

sudo apt update

sudo apt-get install samba

To verify that the installation of Samba was successful, type in this command in Terminal.

whereis samba

The output show show as follows:

samba: /usr/sbin/samba /usr/lib/samba /etc/samba /usr/share/samba /usr/share/man/man7/samba.7.gz /usr/share/man/man8/samba.8.gz

Step 2: Setting up Samba.

It is now necessary to create a directory to share now that Samba has been successfully installed. This command line below creates a new folder sambashare in our home directory which we will share later.

mkdir /home/<username>/sambashare/

The configuration file for Samba is located at /etc/samba/smb.conf. To add the new directory as a share, proceed to edit the file by executing the following command line.

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

At the bottom of the file, add the following lines:

[sambashare]

??? comment = Samba on Ubuntu

??? path = /home/username/sambashare

??? read only = no

??? browsable = yes

To save the file, press Ctrl-O and Ctrl-X to exit from the nano text editor.

The comment section adds a brief description of the Samba share.

The path is the directory of the shared folder.

The read only permission allow one to modify the contents of the share folder is only granted when the value of this directive is no.

The browsable section is set to yes so that file managers, such as Ubuntu’s default file manager, will list this share under “Network” (it could also appear as browsable).

For the new shared configuration to take effect, proceed to save it and restart Samba for it to take effect with the following command line.

sudo service smbd restart

Proceed to update the firewall rules to allow Samba traffic:

sudo ufw allow samba

Step 3: Setting up User Accounts and Connecting to Share

Since Samba doesn’t use the system account password, we need to set up a Samba password for our user account:

sudo smbpasswd -a username

Special note: The username used must belong to a system account. Otherwise, it will not save.

Connecting to Share

A quick way to find your IP address in Ubuntu is using the ip a command in Ubuntu’s terminal.

On Ubuntu: Open up the default file manager and click Connect to Server then enter: ubuntuctn

On macOS: In the Finder menu, click Go > Connect to Server then enter: macosctn

On Windows, open up File Manager and edit the file path to:

\\ip-address\sambashare

Note: ip-address is the Samba server IP address and sambashare is the name of the share.

As a final step, you will be prompted to enter your credentials to proceed to connect to the Samba folder.

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