Hugh Perkins's tech blog

I wanted a flat-mate to be able to copy a file off my computer. We didn’t have a usb key with enough free disk space.

I didn’t want to mess around with opening shares on their computer. I didn’t want to be responsible for a security hole on their windows computer.

So I looked at setting up samba. Took a while!

There is a tool to help set it up, which is ‘system-config-samba’. It does make life easier.

It seemed to me to be really unobvious how to set up a simple read-only share with guest access. This post solved it for me:

- change security to ‘share’: “security = share”
- create a unix account, but don’t configure it as a samba account
- assign it as the guest account: guest account = guestaccountname
- create a share
- add ‘guest ok = yes’ to the share configuration
- and ‘browseable = yes’, ‘read only = yes’

After restarting smbd and nmbd, the workgroup, server, and share should be visible on the network to windows users, and not need any sort of authentication to navigate into, or view the files inside.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 5:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.