Samba on Fedora 18

March 22, 2013

I set this up some time ago on my home system, and found it very useful given that I have a windows machine I use to run photoshop. It is very nice to copy files back and forth between the machines using the network. On windows, the area I have decided to share from my linux machine appears as a Z: drive the way I set things up.

Setup on the Linux Side

First you will need the samba packages (which I already have, your mileage may differ). Then you edit the file /etc/samba/smb.conf. I forget the details, but it is relatively simple and there are plenty of tutorials online. To check your configuration, you can run: 
testparm
Then you need to add at least one user to the samba database and start the server: 
smbpasswd -a tom
systemctl enable smb.service
systemctl restart smb.service
Doing the enable ensures that the service will get started next time you reboot. This is not quite enough if you are running a firewall (as you should be).

Network ports and firewall

You will need to open up 4 ports: If you are curious about what ports are being listened to on your system, use: 
netstat -ln
What I do is to hand edit /etc/sysconfig/iptables and do: 
systemctl restart iptables.service
That is it for the linux side.

Setup on the Windows Side

My notes on this (if I ever had any) are lost, but I set the windows machine up to see my linux machine as a Z: "share". Good luck!!
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org