[mythtv-users] OT: Samba help

[Friedrich Clausen]

Hi,

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 4:17 PM, David Watkins <watkinshome at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/10/18 belcampo <belcampo at zonnet.nl>:
>> Damian wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> Sorry for the off topic post, but the answers I get to Linux questions
>>> here are always so much better than anywhere else.
>>>
>>> I've been having Samba problems for a while but I now really need to get
>>> it sorted. I want my MythBox to be the network server for the house as
>>> the machine is always on. I have one Ubuntu laptop, on XP machine and
>>> one dual buut Ubuntu/XP laptop that I want to connect to it.
>>>
>>> I've followed all of the tutorials that I can find on the net and they
>>> always sound so easy but I always come unstuck!
>>>
>>> I'm now in a position where I finally seem to be able to see all of the
>>> shared directories from the different machines, but I assume I just
>>> don't have the appropriate permissions to access them.
>>>
>>> Can anyone help me on this or point me to the right place.
>>>
>>> I somehow had this working for just my XP box, but folowing two other
>>> tutorials seems to have broken that now so I really need to get things
>>> working.
>> I'm in no way an samba expert, but what I can think of youi probably
>> missed is the following:
>> user accounts from all machines need to be known on the backend.
>> As root on your mythbackend smbpasswd -a ubuntulaptop etc
>> restart samba
>
> It also helps if your users and groups have the same ids across all machines.
>
> That's the user Ids and Group IDs that are specified in /etc/passwd
> and /etc/groups (or at least that's where they are in Fedora)

One potential way of solving the permissions issue while still keeping
separate user accounts would be to use the "force user" and "force
group" option under the share definition, eg:

[Share1]
        comment = A Share
        path = /home/samba_shares/user1
        valid users = samba_user1 samba_user2
        writeable = yes
        browseable = yes
        force user = local_system_user
        force group = local_system_user

And, note, that sometimes Samba expects the smbpasswd users to have a
corresponding system account (eg. username present in /etc/passwd and
/etc/samba/smbpasswd). But then don't activate the accounts (no shell
+ no password).

HTH!

Fred.