Samba

This article is a stub. You can help Gentoo Wiki by expanding it.

External resources

	Homepage

	Wikipedia

Samba is a re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol, an MS Windows alternative to NFS.

Installation

Kernel

You need to activate the following kernel options:

Kernel configuration

File Systems --->
    [*] Network File Systems --->
        [*] CIFS support (advanced network filesystem, SMBFS successor)--->
            [*] CIFS Statistics
                [*] Extended Statistics
            [*] CIFS Extended Attributes
                [*] CIFS POSIX Extentions

Software

If you don't really want the full samba package, you can install only the net-fs/cifs-utils package:

root # emerge --ask cifs-utils

Usage

Mount the shared content

When your client is fully configured, you can access the shares like this:

Create the mount point

root # mkdir -p /mnt/My-Disk/{Media,Shared}

Mount the exported folders

root # mount.cifs //O2-Foobar/Media /mnt/My-Disk/Media -o guest

root # mount.cifs //O2-Foobar/Shared /mnt/My-Disk/Shared -o guest

Automatically mount shares on every boot

If you want to automatically mount your shares on every boot, then edit your fstab to look like this:

File/etc/fstab

//O2-Foobar/Media /mnt/My-Disk/Media cifs guest
//O2-Foobar/Shared /mnt/My-Disk/Shared cifs guest

Note

In case you get permission problems when trying to create files and folders in your disk, try to use gid=<your_user_gid>, uid=<your_user_uid>.

Troubleshooting

The following problems may pop up when trying to mount your shiny new CIFS shares:

Cannot resolve <server-name>

And more specifically, the actual error looks like this

root # mount.cifs ...

---

"mount error: could not find target server. TCP name foo/bar not found. No ip
address specified and hostname not found"

This can easily be fixed by editing /etc/nsswitch and appending wins next to hosts entry

File/etc/nsswitch

hosts: files dns wins

If this does not work, you can use the NFS server's IP address instead of the O2-Foobar hostname. You can use the nmblookup utility (provided by net-fs/samba) to find out the IP address of an NFS host

root # nmblookup O2-Foobar

Shutdown process hangs when trying to unmount cifs shares

In case your system fails to shutdown or reboot properly, then you need to make sure you umount the cifs shares before udev tries to stop.

The easy way is to create a local.d script:

root # echo "umount -a -t cifs -f" > /etc/local.d/cifs.stop

External resources

• Practical Exercises in Successful Samba Deployment
• Samba Howto Collection
• Samba GUI