Samba

Instructions to install and use Samba with Armadeus

Introduction

Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that has, since 1992, provided file and print services to all manner of SMB/CIFS clients, including the numerous versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems

This page will summarize the process to build, install basic samba services such as

• Mounting windows shares
• Sharing folders for Windows computers

Kernel configuration

First, you must have a right kernel configuration to enable the usage of SAMBA :

• You must have a networking support (trivial).......
• "File systems->Network File Systems->SMB file system support" is enabled
• "File systems->Network File Systems->SMB file system->Use a default NLS" is enabled
  • "withs Default Remote NLS Option = cp437"
• "File systems->Network File Systems->CIFS support" is enabled
• "File systems->Network File Systems->Native Language Support"
  • Codepage 437 (United States, Canada)
  • Codepage 850 (Europe)
  • NLS ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1; Western European Languages)
  • NLS ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1; Western European Languages) (this is optional)

Note that in some cases NLS default cp437 can be changed in samba configuration.

Mounting a windows share

To do this you must have the smbmount command. Enable it into your buildroot configuration. Additionally the util-linux package is necessary: you must enable it into your buildroot configuration too. After that, you can mount a windows share by using the following command:

smbmount //hostname/SMBshare /mnt/smb -o username=freddys,password=fredspass

Or by using the ip address

smbmount //192.168.1.2/SMBshare /mnt/win -o username=freddys,password=fredspass

Sharing folders

To share folders for windows, you must enable the nmbd & smbd commands into your buildroot configuration. Optionally you may install the /etc/init.d start script. The basic samba configuration file is located at /etc/samba/smb.conf. Browse it and you will see that a basic configuration is available. The /tmp and /home/default folders are exported for the default user (no password) and therefore you can mount them by using the smbmount command on your Linux PC as before:

smbmount //APF9328/tmp /mnt/apf -o username=default,password=

Typical problem

• smbmount errors :

Because smbmount is using the mount command, make shure you are not using the mount command of the busybox! --> enable package "util-linux" in your buildroot configuration and install the new file system

• mount does not complete or Input/output errors:
  • Verify that /etc/mtab is not a symbolic link to /proc/mounts. If it is, erase /etc/mtab and reboot. Linux will create a correct /etc/mtab
  • Are you shure that your mount point has correct access rights?

Links

The complete (and very big!!) documentation can be found here:

• http://www.samba.org/