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

Mon Feb 23 19:12:09 UTC 2009
Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>

On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 02:53 +0800, Noob Centos Admin wrote:
> Everytime I have to setup samba to handle Windows users, sometime
> inadvertently goes wrong or doesn't work the way I expected, or takes
> forever to setup, especially when there are many users and various
> policies. So far, the easiest, sureest and quickest method appears to
> be install WindowsXP into VMWare and use it to handle Windows sharing.
> Needless to say, this strucks me as rather ironic and stupid.
> 
> Thus could anybody please suggest a working frontend to samba that
> makes it easy to add users, set their permissions and get something
> that works like basic windows file sharing?
> 
> So far I've tried the following which all don't quite work.
> 
> 1. CentOS's samba configuration tool
> - added users never show up on the share configuration so the only
> shares it could create was for public access.
> 
> 2. Webmin
> - thinks it added the users, but again they never show up when checked
> against the bundled CentOS tool and needless to say, the shares never
> work too
> 
> 3. Samba SWAT
> - Very confusing tool, selecting shares sometimes end up as another
> share, and again, doesn't seem to work.
> 
> 
> So I just need a very basic tool that will reliably allow me to do the
> following
> - specify user name, specify password, and maybe specify a group
> - specify a share the user or group has read only or read/write access
> - force new files/folders to take on group ID so that it behaves like
> a normal windows share
> 
> Don't need print services or anything, it's just far easier to dump a
> hardware print server into the network than to contemplate the
> additional complexity of making something like CUPS work.
> 
> Just need to make sure that the Windows users can browse to the
> folders, get a prompt for their login and password where needed.
----
probably not the answer you want to hear but...

swat is supposed to be the tool for simple administration.

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.

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'

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.

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.

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.

Craig