The server OSes justifiably make this task a bit more challenging to keep administrators from inadvertently sharing out folders that shouldn’t be shared or causing security holes to pop up on their servers. But that does not mean the task is impossible…in fact it’s not that much more difficult than it is on their brethren desktop. Let’s take a look at how this is done on CentOS.

The tool

Figure 1

Fortunately, there is a GUI tool for just about everything. This too goes for configuring Samba. In the CentOS distribution, the task of administering Samba shares is handled by system-config-samba. This tool is easy to use, but must be run as the root user. If you do not have access to the root user, you will have no luck starting the tool. But with that coveted root user password you can start up the Samba admin tool with the command system-config-samba.

Once the tool has started you will find a very user-friendly GUI (see Figure 1). By default nothing has been shared out…and before you do share anything, you will need to configure Samba. To do this click Preferences > Server Settings. This new window has two tabs:

• Basic: Configure the name of your workgroup and a description of said workgroup.
• Security: Configure the security of your Samba server.

NOTE: The more important tab is the security tab. Here  you will configure the authentication mode.

Figure 2

Once you have the server configured click on Preferences > Users. You must add users here before anyone can authenticate (if you select Security = users). Figure 2 shows how users are added. Make sure you select the correct Unix username from the dropdown. After you add that username click OK to be returned to the original window.

You are now ready to connect to your newly added share. You might, however find that you can not connect to that share. If so, the most likely reason is the firewall. Click on System > Administration > Security Level and Firewall. In this window (see Figure 3) you will need to make sure that Samba is checked, but also add ports 137 – 139 and 445.

Figure 3

After you have added all the necessary ports you should be able to connect to that share without a problem. Although you may be tempted to drop your firewall all together (in order to let Samba connections through) it is imperative that you do not simply drop your firewall. Remember, CentOS is a server OS and should be protected.

Final thoughts

It’s nice to see that even on the server distributions that Samba has become an incredibly easy system to administer. The system-config-samba tool makes sharing out server directories as easy as if you were on the desktop. Kudos to CentOS, Red Hat, and GNOME!

One would think that an easy task. It actually is, once you know how it is done.  And in this article I am going to show you two different ways of making the connection to your Samba server. You will need to have a working knowledge of how the Samba server is set up as well as a username/password configured on the Samba server. There are also a few steps to take on the desktop for one certain method of connection.

The two methods I will describe are: Using GNOME’s Connect To Server dialog and the command line. The latter will be used to show you how to set up auto mounting for Samba.

The graphical method

Figure 1

If you take a look at the GNOME Places menu you will see an entry labeled “Connect to server…”. This is what you want to use in order to connect to your Samba server. When you click on that a new window will open. From the Service type drop-down select “Windows share” (see Figure 1).

When you select that entry some of the configuration options will change. As you can see (in Figure 1), I have entered the necessary options to connect to a Samba server on my internal network. You will want to replace the information so it reflects your needs. The only tricky bit of information might be the Folder entry. If you are connecting to the root directory on the share you will not need to enter anything there. Say, for instance, you share is /media/samba/user. If you want to connect to that directory leave the Folder entry blank. Say, however, you want to connect directly to a sub-folder within that share – you can enter that folder here. This, of course, isn’t needed because you can always traverse the sub-directories with simple navigation. You can also choose to add a bookmark instantly, from in this window.

Figure 2

Once you have all of the information entered click Connect and you will be greeted with a new window that requires you to enter a password. Also, if you do not supply a Domain name in the previous window, you will be required to enter it here.

You can also set this up to remember your password either until you logout or until, well, forever. Once you have entered the password/domain click the Connect button and a new Nautilus window will open inside of your Samba Share.

Using the command line

Now we’re going to use the command line to accomplish a similar goal. The biggest difference is that we are going to actually mount the Samba share into another directory, very much the same way we would mount a second hard drive.

There are a few pieces to put together before we actually take care of the mounting. First let’s create a directory that the Samba share will be mounted to. So from the terminal window issue the following command:

sudo mkdir /media/samba

Now let’s make sure our users can read/write to this directory with the command:

sudo chmod -R u+rw /media/samba

Okay now let’s make sure we can see the Samba shares from the command line. We’ll do that with the smbclient command like so:

smbclient -L //SAMBA_SERVER_ADDRESS

Where SAMBA_SERVER_ADDRESS is the actual IP address of the Samba server.

Figure 3

You will be prompted for your username and password. If you get an error it could be that the usernames don’t match on each end. If that’s the case you could add the -U switch to the command like so:

smbclient –user=jlwallen -L  //SAMBA_SERVER_ADDRESS

You should see output similar to that shown in Figure 3.

Now it’s time to try to mount the Samba share to the /media/samba directory. To do this issue the command:

sudo mount -t cifs //SAMBA_SERVER_ADDRESS/SHARE -o username=USERNAME /media/samba/

Where:

• SAMBA_SERVER_ADDRESS is the IP address of the Samba server.
• SHARE is the share name.
• USERNAME is the username to connect with.

If that works you can now make this an automated mount by adding the following line to your /etc/fstab file:

//SAMBA_SERVER_ADDRESS/SHARE     /media/samba    cifs  credentials=/etc/samba/user.cred 0 0

Where SAMBA_SERVER_ADDRESS is the IP address of the Samba server and SHARE is the share name.

Notice the user.cred file. This is one last thing we need to create. With your text editor create this file and place into it:

username=USER

password=PASSWORD

Where USER is the username to log in with and PASSWORD is the password to use for authentication. The final step is the give this new file the proper permissions with the command:

sudo chmod 600 /etc/samba/user.cred

You can ensure this works by issuing the command mount -a which should mount your Samba share.

Final thoughts

You should now have an auto-mounting Samba share – or the ability to easily connect your GNOME desktop to a Samba share. Samba is a very powerful tool that not only can share files with Windows machines, but with Linux machines as well.