Integrating Samba

CHAPTE R Integrating Samba Making It Work with Windows Y ou may already have a Samba server up and running in your network Many people do, because it’s such an easy and convenient solution to offer file sharing to Windows clients Few people, however, have a Samba server that is integrated with other operating systems used in their environment Achieving such integration is the focus of this chapter In this chapter you’ll first read a short section on how to quickly and easily set up a simple Samba server that offers file sharing and nothing more In that section you will use the oi^l]oos` command to add individual user accounts Sure, that works, but it’s not a very sophisticated solution if you have many users to manage, because you need to create every user account twice Following the short introduction, there are three sections that explain how to truly integrate Samba in your network The first section explains how to integrate Samba with LDAP, which is useful because it provides one centralized location from which you can manage user accounts Next, you’ll read how to set up your Samba server as a Windows NT 4–style Primary Domain Controller (PDC) This solution explains how you can replace a current Windows NT server with Samba without your users even noticing the change The last section explains how to integrate Samba in Active Directory It teaches you how to set up Samba as a member server in Active Directory Currently, making it more than a member server still isn’t possible, because Samba version 4, which is supposed to make that possible, is not in a stable state yet Setting Up Samba the Easy Way In this section you’ll learn the easy way to set up Samba It explains how you can define a share and create a Samba user that has access to this share At the end of this section, you’ll learn how to test whether this share is working properly Setting up Samba the easy way involves the following general steps, each of which is explained in detail in the sections that follow: 231 232 C HAPTER N INT EG R A TING S A MB A Create a local directory to share Set permissions on this directory Configure oi^*_kjb to define the share Create a Samba user account Test access to the share Creating a Local Directory to Share So what exactly is a share? Basically, it is a directory on the local Linux file system that is accessible over the network To create such a share, the first step is to create a local directory This is as easy as applying the ig`en command So, assuming you want to share a local directory with the name +od]na, simply use ig`en+od]na to create the local directory Applying Permissions to the Local Directory When working with Samba, you need to make sure that the appropriate permissions are applied to the share These permissions are granted to a local user account You can grant permissions the easy way, by just entering the command _dik`333+od]na, but I don’t recommend doing that It is much better to create a dedicated group in Linux and make members of that group all users to whom you want to give access to the share Assuming that the name of this group is o]i^]cnkql, you use _dcnlo]i^]cnkql+od]na to make that group the share owner Once that is done, apply the permissions, granting full permissions to the user owner and group owner and no permissions to others: _dik`33,+od]na This creates a situation that is much more secure, because it ensures that other users cannot access the share Defining the Share Now that you have set up everything that is necessary on the local file system, you need to define the share in Samba Before you can start setting it up, you must install it first There are several packages that relate to the Samba file server You can get a list of them by using the ]lpepq`aoa]n_do]i^] command Listing 9-1 shows the result of this command when applied to my test server C H A P T E R N I N T E G R A T I N G S A M B A Listing 9-1 aptitude search samba Provides an Overview of Available Samba Packages nkkp