Browsing Linux Shares

My /etc/samba/smb.conf on Raspberry PiOS has entries such as

The UNIX permissions on (in my case) /home/pi/CumulusMX are 755 (rwxr-xr-x) with owner and group set to "pi" (the default user).

What error do you get if you open a Command Prompt window on Windows and do

net view \\server (where "server" is the hostname of the Unix computer)?

And what about

dir \\server\MediaShare

I think there might be a problem with the version of the SMB protocol that Windows is using.

You can use the testparm command to check the configuration without restarting samba. I'm not sure how you would guess that if nobody has told you.

As far as I'm aware, every samba share needs to be mapped to a drive letter in Windows, for each user, then all is reasonably well. That's the way we do it. Even then, the odd file gets saved from Windows with the wrong permissions.

The samba people do their best, but SMB/CIFS is an MS invention, which they are free to muck about with at any time, and they do. It all originally came from DOS, with the drive letters and Lan Manager, and some of that seems to still survive at odd times. And I don't mess about with domains.

No need for mapped drive letters, using UNC paths is fine.

I have enabled SMB 1, that came up in my many searches :-)

C:\Users\jeff>dir \\JGMediaServer\MediaShare

Volume in drive \\JGMediaServer\MediaShare is MediaShare Volume Serial Number is A562-FD19

Directory of \\JGMediaServer\MediaShare

C:\Users\jeff>net view \\JGMediaServer Shared resources at \\JGMediaServer

JGMediaServer server (Samba, Ubuntu)

Share name Type Used as Comment

------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MediaShare Disk (UNC) The command completed successfully. and for luck:

C:\Users\jeff>net view Server Name Remark

------------------------------------------------------------------------------- \\JGMAIN \\JGSERVER \\MEDIASERVER MediaServer server (Samba, Ubuntu) \\N54L N54L server (Samba, Ubuntu) \\V17 The command completed successfully.

This picked up MEDIASERVER which I set up this morning but not JGMEDIASERVER on the HP.

I will compare the smb.conf files.

Yes, but the only Windows user here isn't a command line person, if you know what I mean. Mapped drives are easily understood. Windows File Explorer network browser finds my Raspberry Pi but not another server which uses an older samba protocol. Yes, I can force Windows to see it, which is how I mapped its shares, but if I just want to print a file, I don't want to mess about, just open it and print.

Still, life is a bit easier now than when I had to mess about with Lan Manager protocol levels, having been through every Windows since 95 and every Debian since sarge as a server.

Aha....... Windows 11 had an update rolled out that disabled support for SMB 1.0, SMB 1.1 and SMB2.0 but support for SMB 3.0 was enabled

You have two options: upgrade the server to support SMB 3.0 or find an article online on how to force Windows 11 to support SMB 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0

Look at

See

I gave up on windows and samba a long time ago BUT from memory you need to check the nmb daemon is running to browse.

Also on some instances you needed to frig with windows permissions.Possibly in the registry.

Sorry thats all I got

nemo //wallace/shared nemo //192.168.1.3/shared

thunar //wallace/shared thunar //192.168.1.3/shared

If the symbolic form does not work, you can resort to using the IP address.

IP address info can be obtained with:

ipconfig # Windows ifconfig # Linux

It's not that hard to have a good time.

Jeff isn't a cripple by the way, he can follow a recipe like anyone else here.

This README gives a little background on getting an icon to show up. Some of the info here, isn't exactly correct but it's close enough to hint at how much trouble this will be to fix.

AHA :-/

Paul

It's Win 10, I have enabled SMB 1.0.

It's Win 10, I have enabled SMB 1.0.

It would be good to be able to install whatever Linux uses (?NFS) on Windows.

Well you used to be able to with Sun PC-NFS

I think now its built-in to windows

I use autofs and sshfs to share all my linux drives.

No personal experience, but this claims to be a Windows equivalent.

All my Linux machines are Active directory clients, using a windows server for authentication and access to resources, SMB shares all over the place. This is using SSSD / Kerberos. Administration and configuration of new machine is done via Puppet (now Openvox)

It works well enough, but script execute permissions in Linux don't translate to anything sensible in Windows. If I need to share a directory that had Linux scripts in use, I'd do better with the NFS protocol, or SSH/SCP.

With individual Microsoft machines running against their own security databases (rather than something shared), the potential for it not working is great - unless the user tears down the security and configures it all wide open, with insecure ancient protocols waiting for malware to attack...

Once the windows sharing is properly sorted out (which is possible without a domain, by using common credentials), then there shouldn't be file access issues with SMB and Linux.

Solving these type of issues, is one thing that Chat-GPT/Copilot is very good at hand-holding step by step, rather than randoms that suggest SMB

I remember PC-NFS. It was a DOS add-on that could access filesystems on our Unix servers. I'm not sure whether any additional software had to be installed on the server, or how sharename/Unix pathname equivalences were set up - but it was in the late 1980s so nearly 40 years ago.

I'm not sure how PC-NFS and SMB/Samba differed, apart from behind-the-scenes protocol differences.

There are two other win 11 wrinkles that can catch you out...

The first is that Win 11 now blocks access to open shares. So unless it has a username/password set on the share it will either make like it can't find it at all, or it will prompt for credentials (even though you know the share does not need them). Sometimes accompanied by text in red that reads:

"You can't access this shared folder because your organization's security policies block unauthenticated guest access. These policies help protect your PC from unsafe or malicious devices on the network."

Then there is a more recent problem even on servers that are SMB3 compatible but don't append the security signature in exactly the form it wants. (I have seen this even where there share is on a windows box)

You can fix the first with the following admin powershell (on windows):

Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableInsecureGuestLogons $true -Force

The second with:

Set-SmbClientConfiguration -RequireSecuritySignature $false

(then it will query where to apply - answer "a" for all in most cases.

If you want to run the above from a CMD window, then prefix with:

powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "<command from above>"