Friday, April 11, 2008

Setting up samba with password protection

To easily share your files to linux and windows clients, samba is still the preferred choice. In this guide I will show how to setup a samba server on centos 5 machine, that can be accessed only by certain people protected by password.

  1. Install samba on the server
    • # yum install samba
  2. Create the group that all the samba users will be contained in, for example 'samba'
    • # groupadd samba
  3. Create samba users and add it to the above group, which is in this example is 'samba'. Below is the example to create a user named 'user1' and add it to group 'samba'. Set the password for user1
    • # useradd user1 -g samba
    • # passwd user1
  4. Create the directory to be shared. In this example, i will use /home/shared. Change the ownership to root and group ownership to the 'samba' group. Change permission so that only user and group can read write and execute
    • # mkdir /home/shared
    • # chown -R root.samba /home/shared
    • # chmod -R 775 /home/shared
  5. Below is a simple setting of samba
    • [global] workgroup = samba
      server string = Samba Server
      security = user [shared_folder]
      comment = Sharing place
      path = /home/shared
      public = no
      writable = yes
      printable = no
      write list = @samba
      create mask = 0755
      force create mode = 0755
      directory mask = 0775
      force directory mode = 0775
    • What the above setting does basically is to setup /home/shared as samba shared directory but can only be accessed by user from group samba
  6. Add user/users to samba
    • # smbpasswd -a user1
  7. Start smb service, restart if it has already been started
    • # /etc/init.d/smb start
  8. 'user1' can now access the samba server using address 'smb://samba_server_ip_address/shared_folder' at any nautilus address bar. For windows client, you can see at your 'My Network Places' and find a workgroup named 'samba'

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

blooming marvelous, thank you so much for this very useful post.