[CentOS] Easiest way to get samba up and working for Windows users?

[Noob Centos Admin]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 3:12 AM, Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> 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 :(


> You are asking several questions but lumping them all under one category
> samba. The concept of UNIX or Linux administration is simple text files
> that can be manipulated with just about any editor that suits you though  I
> would suggest that you refrain from using Windows editors because they  add
> line endings that often cause issues.


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.


> the group idea is rather simple...
> let's say that you have a directory /home/samba/files and you set up a
> share in smb.conf called [Files], and all your users are members of the
> group 'users' then you would simply 'chgrp users /home/samba/files' and
> 'chmod g+s /home/samba/files' and that enables the 'group sticky bit' so
> that all files and folders in that directory are owned by group 'users'


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.

Now adding users is a bit more complicated in that samba users must
> necessarily be Linux users AND samba users so they would have to be added
> to both systems.


This was one of the caveats I discovered over time, struggling with webmin
and the likes.

Something like Webmin can help here in that it can be configured to
> automatically create the samba user at the same time that a Linux user  is
> created but it doesn't do that upon first install.


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.


You probably want to check out something like the 'Samba By Example'
> publication which can be purchased at your favorite bookstore in dead  tree
> form or can be downloaded in PDF form or read online @
> http://www.samba.org/samba/docs (see left side) which will walk you
> through basic steps.


Trust me, I did read through that. I usually don't like to bug people for
help unless I really cannot find any relevant existing information and
cannot figure out what else can I try.


Thanks for replying in any case :)
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