Samba
I want to create shared folder that I can access from any device on my local network so I decided to try out Samba to get some experience. I'm mainly using this guide, but my notes will be a scaled down version. Ubuntu also has a great tutorial here
Installation
sudo apt install samba
Verify Installation with: whereis samba
Users and Groups
We want to create a samba user and group and add our user to the group.
Note
You can use the existing Ubuntu user as well. If you do not want to add a new user skip to the Create Group step. More information about users and groups can be found here
Create User
adduser will create the new user and prompt for a password
sudo adduser smbuser
Create Group
sudo addgroup smbgroup
Add our user to the group
sudo usermod -aG smbgroup smbuser
Set the samba password. Note this will be the password used when connecting from a remote device
sudo smbpasswd -a smbuser
Set up and configure Samba
Next we will create the directory we want to share on our network and configure Samba to serve it.
Directory
sudo mkdir -p /home/smbuser/samba/share/
Set up the permissions
sudo chown -R root:smbgroup /home/smbuser/samba/share
sudo chmod -R 0770 /home/smbuser/samba/share
Configure Samba
Last but not least we need to configure Samba to share our directory we just created. There are lots of configurations available, but in this case we are just going to simplify the file.
sudo nano /etc/samba/samba.conf
Replace the contents with this
[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
server string = Samba Server %v
netbios name = <name of your machine>
security = user
[share]
path = /home/smbuser/samba/share
valid users = @smbgroup
guest ok = no
writable = yes
browsable = yes
Restart Samba
sudo service smbd restart
Check the config
testparm
Connect from another device
At this point you should now be sharing a folder on your LAN. There are lots of ways to connect, the easiest is to use network discovery on the OS you are running. Another option is to manually type in the IP address. When prompted you will need to enter your user and password we created earlier.
External Drive
I had some issues getting the permissions set up right for an external hard drive. I fought with it over and over trying to get the permissions ot work right with chown and nautilus, but nothing would take. I ended up finding one answer on superuser that fixed the mount.
Step 1
Open Disks and take note of the mount point for me it was /dev/sda1 mounted to /media/<user>/<ExternalDrive>
Step 2
Unmount the drive in Disks selecting the external drive and pressing the stop button
Step 3
Remount the drive using the appropriate permissions
sudo mount -o uid=root,gid=smbgroup /dev/sda1 /media/<user>/<ExternalDrive>
Note
Replace <user> with your ubuntu user and <ExternalDrive> with the name of your external drive.
Info
External hard drives can only be accessed by users with root access or mounted to the users directory. Ex: user1 cannot access an external samba share mounted to /media/user2/drive
Editing fstab
Warning
Danger, please know what your doing before proceeding...see this guide
For me setting the permissions and ntfs-3g options auto mounted my external hard drive how I wanted.
UUID=FAEA8385EA833D3F /media/<user>/Seagate\040Expansion\040Drive ntfs-3g auto,users,uid=root,gid=smbgroup,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0