Hello,

I want to ask a stupid question (instead of making a stupid mistake! )

so here it is:

I've just set up Samba on CentOS 4, and I want to set up a shared folder that everyone in the office can use for docs that are for all to see. Main thing is, I'm very new to Linux and looking at the ton of folders already on the drive I was wondering where is best to put that folder.


Any help much appreciated.

From my experience it sort of depends on the layout of your hard drive.
I usually setup a /var/samba/whatever_share_dir for my servers. Users /home/username is shared as well.

You could also do something like /home/share/_dir_names if you have more room on /home. The thing to remember is permissions chmod 777 or whatever you need it to be.

thanks a lot asommer! Much appreciated

What did you end up doing and how did it work out?

Sorry for the delay.

I setup the share as /var/samba/ but even though I could ping the server I couldn't smb to the share. So I fiddled about with all sorts of things in the smb.conf which I can't remember off hand (umm, setting the ipranges properly...?), and it still doesn't work. I've set it to allow everyone.

I'm back in front of it Monday and when I find out the fix I will post it up, for reference.

Hi!

What I do whenever I make a public Samba share is to create a /opt/public folder, then chmod it to 777. After that, everything will be just a matter of setting it up.

Sample snippet:

admin@linux: # mkdir /opt/public
admin@linux: # chmod 777 /opt/public
admin@linux: # cd /etc/samba
admin@linux: # vi smb.conf

...somewhere in your smb.conf:

[Your Shared Folder]
inherit acls = Yes
path = /opt/public/
read only = no
writeable = true ;or 'write ok = true'
browseable = yes
guest ok = Yes

You can also add the windows users and their password into Linux then add them to Samba using the 'smbpasswd' command:

admin@linux: # useradd user
admin@linux: # smbpasswd -a user
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:

Don't forget to check your firewall too, it might be blocking the SMB port(s).

Hope this helps.