How to setup Samba on Fedora 28 as a public share

JaredBusch

I had to do this recently and, as usual, I though you all might want to have a guide.

Start with Fedora 28 Minimal and then make sure it is up to date

sudo dnf upgrade -y --refresh

Now install everything you will need.

Note: I am installing cockpit in order to use it to setup the storage, because I don't fstab unless I have to. Same for nano, because vi.

sudo dnf install cockpit cockpit-storaged nano samba policycoreutils-python-utils -y

Open the firewall for use of cockpit and samba

sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=cockpit --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=samba --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Set cockpit set to start on reboot, and start now

sudo systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket

Create the mount point

This examples uses /data from here on.

sudo mkdir /data

Setup your storage

Log into cockpit and setup your storage disks or setup your storage disks manually in /etc/fstab. Then reboot to make sure it all comes back right on reboot

sudo reboot

Tell SELinux that this is a samba share

sudo semanage fcontext -a -t samba_share_t "/data(/.*)?"
sudo restorecon -Rv /data/

Create the folders to be shared, only public in this example

sudo mkdir -p /data/shares/public

Make a copy of the original smb.conf

sudo cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.orig

Edit the smb.conf as needed

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

For this example, I have this in the smb.conf file.

[global]
        workgroup = WORKGROUP
        security = user
        map to guest = bad user
        min protocol = SMB2
        passdb backend = tdbsam

[Public]
        comment = Public Read / Write
        path = /data/shares/public
        public = yes
        browseable = yes
        writeable = yes
        read only = no
        force user = pubshare
        guest ok = yes
        guest only = yes

Create the user, in Fedora, that samba will use for the folder

sudo useradd pubshare -s /usr/sbin/nologin

Create the user in samba

Note: Just hit enter twice to set a blank password, or set a real password. It will not affect the operation of the share.

sudo smbpasswd -a pubshare

Change the owner of the share to the user just created

sudo chown pubshare /data/shares/public/

Restart Samba and connect to your share from another system.

sudo systemctl restart smb

JaredBusch

I am intentionally not dealing with password protected share because that gets into a lot of choices.

Such as local privileges, or tie to AD, or tie to some other auth, etc.

jmoore

Thanks a lot!

Reid Cooper

Nice write up, thanks!