Configure SMB

Legacy: This article describes a concept that has been superseded in the course of ongoing development on the Organic Design wiki. Please do not develop this any further or base work on this concept, this is only useful for a historic record of work done. You may find a link to the currently used concept or function in this article, if not you can contact the author to find out what has taken the place of this legacy item.

Configure SMB Organic Design procedure

Here's an example of our samba configuration format for the /etc/samba/smb.conf file:

[global]
	workgroup = Foo
	server string = Foo server
	wins support = yes

	security = user
	encrypt passwords = yes
	password level = 3
	passdb backend = tdbsam

	invalid users = root daemon bin sys mail sshd bind www-data
	browseable = yes
	writable = yes
	create mask = 0777
	directory mask = 0777

[staff]
	path = /shared/staff
	comment = Our staff files
	valid users = henry alan tabatha

• password level = 3 means account foo, Foo and FOO are all equivalent user names
• log level = 4 can be used to debug authentication and other problems, also directing at a single log file can help (instead of one per user)
• passdb backend = tdbsam means use the basic password backend instead of the older smbpasswd format or scalable ldapsam
• Note: whatever password backend is used, smbpasswd needs to be run for each user before they can begin accessing shares

Account synchronisation

The main issue with the initial configuration of Samba on the LAN server concerns the users and groups. What is the origin of the user/group information? and how does samba synchronise to it or use it to authenticate? Since all our servers run a wiki we decided to make the wiki the source of the users, passwords and groups information. To do this we instruct the local wiki daemon to set the unix and samba passwords whenever one is changed in the wiki. All this requires is to install the EventPipe extension on the server's administration wiki and ensure that it has a wiki daemon configured and running.

• Later we need to only synchronise accounts that are in a particular wiki group
• Later we should also allow the shares to be created and configured through FS records

Next steps

• You may want to configure VPN remote access to the smb shares

See also

• Configuration tutorial
• Controlling access to shares
• Authentication security
• Passwords