Noob Centos Admin wrote:
probably not the answer you want to hear but... swat is supposed to be the tool for simple administration.I was afraid of that. By the time I gave up and completed the task manually, I was thinking maybe it might be easier to write my own script to repeat all those useradd, gpasswd -a, smbpasswd and nano smb.conf :(
Is there a windows domain or AD in this picture somewhere? If so, point samba authentication there and don't worry about separate passwords.
No worries about that one, I only edit conf files on my CentOS box using nano. The closest to using Windows for this is to manage my servers are SSH through putty, and writing long php scripts to be uploaded.
If you want something nicer, run freenx on the server and the NX client from www.nomachine.com for your windows box. That lets you connect to a complete GUI desktop remotely and conveniently.
For a single common to everybody share it was easy of course. In fact, for something like that, I'll do away with bothering everybody with a login and simply make a single login everybody shares for filesharing.
It's when I have 8 people who have to share aaa, then a sub group B have to share bbb, then a subgroup C have to share ccc, then a subgroup of people from B+C need to share ddd and so forth that it becomes untenable to do everything by hand and the tools at the moment just dont cut it.
Not that complicated. Just create groups as needed and add the appropriate users to each group (independently, don't worry about which are sub-groups of others).
Then the samba shares look like:
[aaa-share] comment = aaa workspace path = /path/to/aaa-share public = no valid users = @aaa writable = yes printable = no force create mode = 0775 force directory mode = 775 force group = aaa
You might want some other mode, just make sure it is group-read/write. Then you can cut/paste those, substituting the appropriate groups, and do an initial chgrp -R and chmod -R of the top directories to make sure they have the right starting ownership and modes.
Except of course webmin doesn't actually create the smbuser correctly. Maybe it has to do with how I use it, but maybe again like CentOS's tool, that particular functionality is actually broken.
If you use smb authentication against a domain controller, all you have to do is create the linux users with the same login name. With winbind you might not even have to do that, but then I don't know how you control the groups.