481. A little bit of samba on the command line

I have a bit of a problem with samba currently.

My problem is that my computers are sitting behind a router (on a 192.168.2.0/24 subnet) and the computers that I want to access sit on the university network, to which the router is connected. The address range is, say, 131.172.x.x.

In other words, I (think I) want to use samba across two subnets.

I've opened up ports 13-139,445 to tcp and udp on both the router and in iptables on my desktop.

My problem:
1. I can't see the network shares of the other computers using
   a) nautilus (Network/Windows Network)
   b) nmblookup
   c) sambascanner

2. I can't connect to network shares using their netbios names. For example, I'd like to connect to e.g. smb://avance400/data, but I have to use the IP address instead. For some curious reason not even that works using nautilus.

Workaround:
So here's not a solution, but a workaround.

I can connect to other computers from the command line as long as I know the IP address, and here's how

smbclient //131.172.123.30/data -U myuni/me

If you actually want to mount the share, which is password protected, and you do, then do

sudo mount -t cifs -o user=me //131.172.123.30/data /media/smbmounts/

where /media/smbmounts belong to you (e.g. sudo mkdir /media/smbmounts && sudo chown $USER /media/smbmounts).

And that's more or less it.

Some additional information:
If you don't get prompted for the password, and get

mount: block device //131.172.123.30/data is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: cannot mount block device //131.172.123.30/data read-only

but supplying the password as part of the command line works, then you are missing cifs-utils, so install them.

Note that mount.cifs can handle credentials from a special file, e.g. like this , which you chmod to 600. My chief issue with that is that ~/.bash_history has exactly the same permissions (u+rw, go-rwx) and so I don't see how it's that's any safer than exposing everything by supplying your password as part of the mount command. Both should be avoided if possible.

On the other hand you could argue that since the password is transmitted over the network in cleartext you're inviting trouble either way...

300. Briefly: Sharing a folder using SAMBA on Debian

I don't ever use samba, but it's not a bad thing to know how to set up in case you need to share files with someone using Windows in a pinch.

First install samba:

sudo apt-get install samba samba-common smbclient

To get a share up with samba, create an /etc/samba/smb.conf and stick the following in it:

[global]
workgroup=WORKGROUP
guest account=nobody
security=shared

[asharedfolder]
path=/home/lindqvist/shared
guest ok=yes
read only=no
writable=yes
browsable=yes
comment= SMB share

Restart samba:

sudo service samba restart

1. This is an insecure share i.e. <b>anyone can access it</> and edit everything.
2.. Also, by omitting "netbios name=  " you can use the IP address of the server as the hostname, but you could also specify e.g. "netbios name=niobium" and use that as the hostname in nautilus when you connect to the host server.

To set up a user- and password-based share, do

[global]
workgroup=WORKGROUP
security=user

[asharedfolder]
path=/home/lindqvist/shared
guest ok=no
read only=no
writable=yes
browsable=yes
comment= SMB share

You need to add and set the samba password, and enable the linux user you want to give access as well:

sudo smbpasswd -L -a -e lindqvist

---

There are a lot of other options that can be set. Two of the more interesting ones are probably

[asharedfolder]
createmask=0755
valid users=me myself irene

which means that any new files created in that share via samba gets chmod 755, and only the users me, myself and irene can connect.

But often a basic smb.conf is easier to manage and will do what you want it to.