The ever cunning Linux dances the Samba

by David M Williams

Thursday, 25 October 2007

Page 2 of 3 It’s now time to get Samba up and running. Fire up the package management tool for your distribution. For instance, under Ubuntu you might click System, Administration, and Synaptic Package Manager. Under Fedora you would click Applications then Add/Remove Software. You might also use other means like the command sudo apt-get install samba smbfs. If you use the apt-get command above, Samba will install automatically. If you are using a GUI tool, locate the Samba package and select it, then instruct the tool to download and install it. Note importantly that if you have SELinux operating you will need to update its configuration item so that it allows Samba to share files and directories. You must configure Samba before it actually does anything. Call up the freshly-installed Samba server settings window. Click the Preferences, Server settings menu. You will be prompted to give the name of your Windows workgroup along with an optional description. Click OK to apply your changes and close the dialog box. Next, start the Linux service configuration window. Here, you can control what runs when the system boots as well as start or stop any individual service. You want to do two things here: firstly, start Samba running right now, and secondly have it auto-start when your computer kicks in. Find the smb service item; click Start and select the checkbox next to it. The smb service actually consists of two separate services. The first of these is smbd, which is a daemon process that handles client SMB connections to your system, and the second is nmbd, which is a daemon process to control the advertising of shared devices over your network. By now, Samba is loaded and running. Unfortunately it’s still not usable yet; you now need to open the Firewall applet. Here, you want to have your firewall permit SMB traffic to enter your system. Locate the Samba entry in your firewall and mark it as a trusted service. Linux will now allow SMB traffic from network clients to successfully make it through to your computer. There is now one final step: although remote computers can send SMB traffic, nobody has yet been authorised to do so. Edit the file /etc/samba/smb.conf using your favourite text editor; remember to run it using the sudo command or from within a superuser account, because you will need to be able to write modifications back to the file system. The modifications you wish to make will provide granular control over who may print. There’s two real options: one is to make unique user accounts for each person on your network, or alternatively, if you are just enabling a home printer in a family environment you might simply permit anyone to print to the shared printer. Either way, you do it through /etc/samba/smb.conf. To let just anyone print, edit that file, and locate the [printers] section. Find the commented-out line “; guest ok = no” and change it to “guest ok = yes”. (Note, the semicolon has been removed as well as the no changing to a yes.) Now your network guests may print without authentication required. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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