Samba Server Configuration in CentOS 6.5

This guide explains how to configure samba server in CentOS 6.5 with anonymous & secured samba servers. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Samba is freely available, unlike other SMB/CIFS implementations, and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.

1 Preliminary Note

I have fresh installed centos 6.5 server, on which I am going to install the samba server. Off-course you need to have one windows machine to check the  samba server that must be reachable with the centos server. My centos server have hostname server1.example.com & IP as 192.168.0.100

You can have your centos server installed from the starting seven chapters of the tutorial.Just enable the epel repo & continue further.

Note:

• There is no need to install the Developments-tools in chapter-7 of the tutorial.
• The Windows machine must be on same workgroup. To check the value in windows machine run the command at cmd prompt

net config workstation

It will be like this

Your windows machine must be at same Workstation domain as in centos server, i.e. WORKGROUP in my case.

• To make the windows machine reachable in windows proceed like this. In the run terminal & add  the entry of your server IP address

notepad C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

In my case it was like this, just save the values.

[...]
192.168.0.100 	server1.example.com	centos	

2 Anonymous samba sharing

First I will explain the methodology to install the samba with the anonymous sharing. To install samba run,

yum install samba samba-client samba-common

It will install samba with Version 3.6.9-168.el6_5.

Now to configure samba edit the file /etc/samba/smb.cnf before making changes I will make the backup of original file as  /etc/samba/smb.cnf.bak

mv /etc/samba/smb.cnf /etc/samba/smb.cnf.bak

Further give the entries like this

vi /etc/samba/smb.cnf

[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
server string = Samba Server %v
netbios name = centos
security = user
map to guest = bad user
dns proxy = no
#============================ Share Definitions ============================== 
[Anonymous]
path = /samba/anonymous
browsable =yes
writable = yes
guest ok = yes
read only = no

mkdir -p /samba/anonymous

chkconfig smb on

service smb restart

service nmb restart

Now you can access the centos sharing in windows as follows:

From windows machine just browse the folder& try to create a text file, but you will get an error of permission denied.

Check the permission for the shared folder.

[root@server1 samba]# ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 28 14:11 anonymous
[root@server1 samba]# 

To allow anonymous user give the permissions as follows:

[root@server1 ~]# cd /samba/
[root@server1 samba]# chmod -R 0777 anonymous/
[root@server1 samba]# ls -l
total 4
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4096 May 28 14:11 anonymous
[root@server1 samba]#

Now anonymous user can browse & create the folder contents.

You can cross check the content at server also.

[root@server1 samba]# ls -l anonymous/
total 0
-rwxr--r-- 1 nobody nobody 0 May 28 14:41 anonymous_test.txt
[root@server1 samba]#