I own 2 of the computers on my home LAN, one is Red Hat 8 set up as a webserver (old), the other is XP Pro (new).

Using my old computer, I’m trying to setup an internal LAN webserver so I can test my web sites ‘online’ without having to be connected to the internet while I working on the sites. (as I only have a dialup connection and limited time online, can't test them while I'm not connected and can't connect when I need to test them.)

I installed Linux and got apache working and configured. I can access the apache test page on my browser on my other computer.

The website files I have already are on my XP computer and I need to be able to transfer them to the web server. I tried setting up FTP, but the FTP server wouldn’t work. At best, I could only get guest access to view what was in the /var/ftp/ directory. After a number of attempts to get access to /var/www/, I thought ‘screw that, I might as well try SMB’.

I got samba working and configured, and I can now see the Linux box on my XP computer. I have samba set with a share of /var/www/ which shows up on the LAN, but it won’t let me transfer any files from the XP computer to the samba share. I can open files that are already on the share, but not save over them. I’m thinking it is a permission problem somewhere, but nothing I’ve tried seems to work.

After a few attempts, I got a user created and added to the smb database, this user should have full access to where I am trying to put the files (/var/www), but whenever I try via the network share, I just get access denied.

This is what I have for the share in smb.conf

Samba tries very hard not to override the normal unix/linux file permissions so as not to second-guess the system admin. /var and it's contents are normally only writable by root but readable by everyone else, This is most likely why you can see the share, connect to it and see files, but not write to them. Loging in as root changing to /var and doing a swift (but nonetheless effective) chmod -R 777 www/ should sort the unwritable files.

If you have any security sentry that checks the permissions on files and re-sets them if they're wrong (like the directories under /home getting re-set to only be readable/writable to the login name they correspond to) you will need to configure this to make the web directory publically writable but owned by root.




*EDIT* fixing stoopid spelling mistakes

Thanks

I got it working after I saw that it would allow me to transfer to /var/www but not /var/www/html and changed the permissions with:

chmod 775 -R /var/www/
chown apache -R /var/www/
chgrp apache -R /var/www/

Is there anyway I can set up samba to use 755 apache apache for every new file it makes in that share, so I don't have to keep going back to the linux box and change the persmissions when I make a new file?