Using Samba, Second Edition

A Basic Samba Configuration File

The key to configuring Samba is its configuration file, smb.conf. This configuration file can be very simple or extremely complex, and the rest of this book is devoted to helping you get deeply personal with this file. For now, however, we’ll show you how to set up a single file service, which will allow you to fire up the Samba daemons and see that everything is running as it should be. In later chapters, you will see how to configure Samba for more complicated and interesting tasks.

The installation process does not automatically create an smb.conf configuration file, although several example files are included in the Samba distribution. To test the server software, though, we’ll use the following file, which you can create in a text editor. It should be named smb.conf and placed in the /usr/local/samba/lib directory:^[9]

[global]
    workgroup = METRAN 
[test] 
    comment = For testing only, please
    path = /usr/local/samba/tmp
    read only = no
    guest ok = yes

This brief configuration file tells the Samba server to offer the /usr/local/samba/tmp directory on the server as an SMB share called test. The server also becomes part of the METRAN workgroup, of which each client must also be a part. If you have already chosen a name for your own workgroup, use the name of your workgroup instead of METRAN in the previous example. In case you are connecting your Samba system into an existing network and need to know the workgroup name, you can ask another system administrator ...