Mounting samba share with write permissions for regular users

I have tried looking for this information on the Internet but have successfully managed to make myself look dumb. I found nothing for three consecutive days (nights, actually – mostly I sleep in the day, work at night!) I proudly say this – “I may not know everything, but I know where to find it.” But these three days left me increasingly frustrated at the inability to solve a simple problem. Recent trends are showing that I am finding less and less relevant information in my searches. I’m afraid… am I losing the search-fu skillz?

So anyway, rants aside – this is what I was facing:

I have set up samba on my computer named Jaguar, it runs PCBSD 3.3, I wish to access the samba share from Panther, which also runs PCBSD 3.3. I can simply point Konqueror to “smb://192.168.0.2″ (the IP address belongs to Jaguar) and I am able to read and write to the share.

Trouble begins when I try to mount the share using mount_smbfs command. I have configured the share to be public, writable and also allowed guests – also, security is on share basis – so no passwords are required. I add the “-N” switch to my mount_smbfs command to disable password prompt.

mount_smbfs -N -I 192.168.0.2 //guest@192.168.0.2/shared /home/harshad/shared

It mounts the samba share, I am able to read the files… but I cannot write to them. And trying to solve this problem took a good amount of time. I know – it should be simple. And trust me – it is simple. You only have to know how to use two simple switches – “-g” and “-u”.

They tell mount what should be the group id and user id for the mounted filesystem. So, go ahead, look up your user id (uid) from /etc/passwd and group id (gid)for whichever group you wish to allow write access to and substitute in the following command:

mount_smbfs -N -u 1002 -g 10 -I 192.168.0.2 //guest@192.168.0.2/shared /home/harshad/shared

That sure fixed my problem – and I hope it can help you too.

Thanks to: ##FreeBSD channel on freenode.net (IRC)

PCBSD, Samba and Amarok

So my computers Jaguar and Panther (nothing to do with MacOS) are running PCBSD for over 50 days now. Cheetah has been on FreeBSD since ages. I’m no sure what I run on, but the BSDs surely have something against me.

It is said that PCBSD makes it easy to share files like in MSWindows… right click on a folder, go to sharing tab… but for me the tab isn’t visible anymore… probably because i recompiled the kernel – because my printer was not going to work without that step, which included downloading the complete source code (FreeBSD comes with this stuff, but I can understand…) anyway… so the sharing tab isnt visible anymore. But when it was, I tried clicking on the settings button which supposedly opens another window… which never opened.

So… after a few deep sighs and a few cups of assam tea, I decided to go the old way – set up smb.conf on Jaguar by hand and using mount_smbfs on other machines. Followed the steps from http://www.freebsddiary.org/samba.php and got it running. I could see the files from Panther in konkueror (smb://10.0.0.4/share) and when I tried to open a file, Konqueror asked me if I wanted to download the file or open it in the related application. That was confusing, and after making up my mind, I decided to open the file instead of downloading it. Well, the file was downloaded to a temporary folder and then opened in the application. Blah! Well, after editing the file, I closed the application and the system asked me if I wanted to upload the file back again. Smart. But not smart enough.

I remembered using mount_smbfs command on FreeBSD and it never bothered me like this. Infact, I remember windows never bothered me with such questions either. For once, I had to accept that that OS is maybe a bit friendly. But then I remebered the horrors of setting up the network under windows… and I felt better. Hehe.

I tried the command but it was not allowing me to connect – authentication error, it barked back. Looked around, could not find anything that would help me, so I went through the smb.conf files available on the internet and came across “security=share” clause under [global] section of the file. Somehow it clicked… I put that in the conf file and restarted smbd… checked mount_smbfs from Panther and voila! it worked!

That’s for the adventure right in the first few hours of my day – who knows what’s left in the day!