Using Samba

Disk Share Configuration

We mentioned in the previous section that there were no disk shares on the hydra server. Let’s continue with the configuration file and create an empty disk share called [data]. Here are the additions that will do it:

[global]
	netbios name = HYDRA
	server string = Samba %v on (%L)
	workgroup = SIMPLE

[data]
	path = /export/samba/data
	comment = Data Drive
	volume = Sample-Data-Drive
	writeable = yes
	guest ok = yes

The [data] share is typical for a Samba disk share. The share maps to a directory on the Samba server: /export/samba/data. We’ve also provided a comment that describes the share as a Data Drive, as well as a volume name for the share itself.

The share is set to writeable so that users can write data to it; the default with Samba is to create a read-only share. As a result, this option needs to be explicitly set for each disk share you wish to make writeable.

You may have noticed that we set the guest ok parameter to yes. While this isn’t very security-conscious, there are some password issues that we need to understand before setting up individual users and authentication. For the moment, this will sidestep those issues and let anyone connect to the share.

Go ahead and make these additions to your configuration file. In addition, create the /export/samba/data directory as root on your Samba machine with the following commands:

# mkdir /export/samba/data
# chmod 777 /export/samba/data

Now, if you connect to the hydra server again (you can do this by clicking ...