This is a writeup on how I, Austin Duncan, setup samba on cass180.ucsd.edu, so that the windows users that are in the group can have access to the SMEI data without having to download the data onto their own computers.

Most of this information can be found on samba.org

1) Go to the downloads section of the website and download the appropriate version of samba.  For cass180, I downloaded the RedHat 7.3 rpm.  There are probably some security bugs on this version, but since we are only using the basic capabilities of samba, I am not too concerned with it.

2) Change into the root user, and install the samba rpm.

3) After installing the rpm, there should be a directory /etc/samba.  This is where your configuration file is installed.  The configuration file is /etc/samba/smb.conf.  When samba is started, this is the file that is read.  This files contains the user permissions, global settings, etc.

4) The following is a copy of the first samba configuration file that I made:


# This is the main Samba configuration file. You should read the
# smb.conf(5) manual page in order to understand the options listed
# here. Samba has a huge number of configurable options (perhaps too
# many!) most of which are not shown in this example
#
# Any line which starts with a ; (semi-colon) or a # (hash) 
# is a comment and is ignored. In this example we will use a #
# for commentry and a ; for parts of the config file that you
# may wish to enable
#
# NOTE: Whenever you modify this file you should run the command "testparm"
# to check that you have not many any basic syntactic errors. 
#
#======================= Global Settings =====================================
[global]
	dns proxy = no 
	null passwords = yes
	encrypt passwords = yes
	socket options = TCP_NODELAY 
	max log size = 50
	writable = no
	security = share
	workgroup = SOLAR
	server string = cass180
	log file = /var/log/samba.%m
	local master = yes
	public = yes
	browsable = yes
	map to guest = smbusr
	guest account = smbusr

[smei1]
	path = /mnt/oftp/smei1/
	browseable = yes
	writeable = no

[smei2]
	path = /mnt/oftp/smei2/
	browseable = yes
	writeable = no

[smei3]
	path = /mnt/oftp/smei3/
	browseable = yes
	writeable = no


As much as I can figure out about samba is that global is a key word, so everything defined under [global] is set for every user.  This is where you determine if passwords are encrypted, the workgroup's name, is it writable at all, what to do with guest users.

/**************************************************  NOTES 
 For what we wanted to do with Samba, which was to have all users be able to read the SMEI data files.  So, I created a user called smbusr.  I mapped all users to this account with the parameter in global:

     map to guest = smbusr
     guest account = smbusr

Now everyone who logs onto the machine is viewed as smbusr.  This made it easy to setup every user to the same access to the smei[1...3] 
 **************************************************/

5) Since there were only three folders, smei1-3, that had to be in samba, under the global parameters, the folders were given there permissions.

 
[smei1]
	path = /mnt/oftp/smei1/
	browseable = yes
	writeable = no


The [smei1] is the name that is going to appear on the windows machine that is accessing the path.  The browseable option allows the guest to see the files that are in the folder.  The writable option determines whether the user can write to that folder (for the user to have write access, the writable option needs to be set here and in the global parameters).

6) So after smei[1...3] parameters were set, the samba daemon had to be started.  That is done by the following:

     /etc/init.d/smb start

     or

     /etc/init.d/samba start

     Depends on which version is being run.

7) I added the samba start command to the /etc/rc.local, so that samba will start automatically start on boot.