Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Samba! Or, how to install SMB (Server Message Block) (Windows) file sharing on Ubuntu Linux 6.10 Edgy Eft

More information on installing Samba can be found here.

The instructions sometimes tell you to use apt-get, but there are ocassionally bugs going back and forth between apt-get and the Synaptic package manager, so that's the way I am going to do it here. Besides, Synaptic is basically only a front end GUI for apt anyway.

#1
We are going to install samba (which is the linux version of windows network smb file sharing), which we want because we want to share files on the local network.
System - administration - synaptic
We might as well make sure we have everything updated.
reload - mark all upgrades
search for samba, mark it for upgrade, and do the same for SMBFS (samba is the program, and smbfs is the file system for samba). You should already have the samba common files installed, but add them if you don't.

#2
Open your terminal by going to:
Applications - Accessories - Terminal
Now we want to add at least one user to samba:

Code:

sudo smbpasswd -a system_username


English translation =
sudo (give me super user privileges temporarily)
-a add
system_username a username that already exists on your system

When you hit enter, it will ask you for a password. Enter one.

#3
Continuing to add a user to samba:
Code:

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smbusers



English translation =
sudo (give me super user privileges temporarily)
gedit open the program called gedit (which is a simple text editor)
/etc/samba/smbusers open the text file located here in gedit
Put the following line in the file:
system_username = "network username"
so, if your system_username from step #2 is BOB, and you want to use the samba network as BOB, then the line will look like this:
BOB = "BOB"
Save the file, and go back to your terminal

When you restart samba using this command:
Code:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart



you should be able to browse the new addition to your network.
Next time, we will actually set up samba to share files with windows machines.

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