For this guide, we will use samba. It is popular enough, so any problems with it, should have a published solution on the internet.

First off, we will need Samba installed on our box. Different operating systems have various ways of installing it.

for gentoo:

emerge -av samba

for debian based:

apt-get install samba

for almost all operating systems, samba can be installed from its binary, which can be downloaded from samba.org

Now in our /etc directory, the installation will create a subfolder /samba and a generic configuration file in it names smb.conf. Lest back up the original configuration file with:

hostname ~ # cd /etc/samba/
hostname samba # cp smb.conf smb.conf.before.changes

This will create a copy of this file labeled smb.conf.before.changes. We continue with flushing the smb.conf file, so we have a clear ground to start building our local network configuration:

echo > smb.conf

this will write 0 bytes in the file.

Step two will be to select the folder, which are to be used for storage. Typically they are in /home. Lets create two folders, which we will use later on:

hostname / # cd /home/
hostname home # mkdir files
hostname home # mkdir docs
hostname home # chown nobody:nobody files/ docs/

Important: on some Linux distributions, the default group for nobody may vary (like nogroup for example). Make sure to check this and apply the correct group when changing ownership and group.

Why was changing ownership necessary? Because we are going to use the nobody user for samba

Finally, as we have both the necessary directories and an empty configuration file, lets build our storage service. Open the /etc/samba/smb.conf file for editing with your preferred editor.

We start with the global (main) samba configuration:

[global]
workgroup = FUTUREPAGES
netbios name = futurepages
comment = futurepages.net
server string = futurepages.net samba server
security = SHARE
encrypt passwords = No
load printers = No
hosts allow = 192.168.0.0/24
hosts deny = ALL
write raw = Yes
read raw = Yes
interfaces = eth0 127.0.0.1
bind interfaces only = yes

The workgroup, name, string and comment determine how other operating systems will see our storage space. Customize to fit your local network’s specifics. Printers are removed, since we are only going to use this as a storage space. Cups will be covered later on. Security is set to share level, since we have restricted the service to our local network only.

The hosts allow directive lets you add the networks which will be granted access. Here we use a typical home network and will allow the 24bit network with 192.168.0.0/24. Multiple networks are separated with intervals. It is very important that the hosts deny directive is after hosts allow, since the file is parsed from up to bottom. Write and Read raw are supposed to be optimization options, which is always good to have. However, an actual speed up is not noted on a low-end machine with a standard (slow) hard drive.

The important directives here are:

interfaces = eth0 127.0.0.1
bind interfaces only = yes

The first one tell samba on which interface(s) it will listen. The second instructs samba to serve requests only on the specified interface and refuses anything (even datagrams) on other interfaces.

Finally, lets add the folders, which we created earlier:

[files]
comment = here be all kinds of files
path = /home/files
writable = Yes
guest ok = Yes

[docs]
comment = here be documents only
path = /home/docs
writable = Yes
guest ok = Yes

Important: Trailing slashes should NOT be added at the end of each directory’s path.

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