So for the last two weeks, I've been out of the house.
The first week was spending time with the step brothers at my dad's house.
Now, halfway through the second week, I'm ankle deep in floppy disks from the 80's cleaning out the study of a packrat grandparent who's passed on.
On the second day here, my grandmother gave me one of her old laptops. Through the night (til about 3 am), I was installing different versions of Linux to try and breath some life into the old machine that previously used Windows 2000. I wanted something lightweight that could be used as a NAS and server. The first thing I tried was Jolicloud. In my own opinion, I have to say that it's very overrated. I felt like there was absolutely no point in having it. If you're not connected to the internet, you can't even use it. Then, when you get in, it just provides links to access different websites with their version of Chrome. This chrome that they've supplied doesn't give any access to options, so you can't install addons and such easily. I immediately wanted adblock after clicking some of their shortcuts, luckily it installed fairly automatically. Once you've got passed all that and you're ready to hear things about the OS itself, well it's been made fool-proof. By that, I mean that you don't have any access to the normal things in Linux that are so necessary to get everything working the way you want it. I'm fairly sure I couldn't access the synaptic packet manager, so I couldn't get my wireless card to work at all because I couldn't get ndiswrapper. After about half an hour of playing around with it, it slowed to an absolute crawl. I would have two or three tabs up in chrome and switching between them would take 10+ seconds. (Keep in mind, all of these experiences are relative to the machine I was on). So that was gone after an hour.
I immediately hit the web searching for more Linux distros that would fit my needs.
Along those lines, I found FreeNAS, Xubuntu, Ubuntu, and another one called Mint.
Mint is focused towards media usage. It comes with most of all necessary codecs needed to play the modern files in your library. The only problem with this, is that the computer probably isn't fast enough to really handle these formats... so that's a little pointless to me.
Next up was FreeNAS. The webUI and everything on this distro is wonderful. The only problem, is that the OS itself is meant to be headless. I'm a big fan of everything this OS does, but I don't think I can get around the fact that I can't actually use the computer itself. So that one is out (until I think I actually need to use it's capabilities).
Now, as it sounds by the name, Xubuntu and Ubuntu are fairly similar. Xubuntu is a lighter weight version of Ubuntu and is probably more of what I was looking for, but I ended up going with Ubuntu. The initial decision for this is that Ubuntu 11.04 comes with Unity. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the laptop wouldn't even be able to utilize it lol. So now it's installed and working great. One of the biggest reasons I'm keeping it is that Ubuntu has the largest community of all linux distros out there, so it will be a lot easier to get support for it if needed.
Reviews over, on to the tutorial!
Ubuntu 11.04 makes it pretty easy to set up the SMB share.
1.) First, right click a folder you want to share and setup sharing
-It should automatically download the SMB, just say yes.
2.) Open up a terminal and type this:
sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf
3.) Everything in here should already look pretty good and work fairly automatically. Go ahead and test that you can access files. If not, you may need to change the workgroup. Now is the time to setup the password!
4.) Search for the area where it says "security = user". This line will most likely have either a # or ; in front of it. This means that the line is commented out. You'll need to remove this commenting to make the line work.
5.) Now, create a new user! This new user is going to act as your credentials for logging into your shared files. Give it a password as such.
6.) Now, open up terminal again. type this: sudo smbpasswd -a <user>
Of course, replace <user> with the name of the account you just made. It will then ask you for a password for the new account.
7.) This should be all you need to do in order to access with a password. When you're connecting with Windows 7, you may need to change some of your settings on the windows side of things to stop the encryption of SMB passwords. To do this, follow the letter steps.
7b.) Winkey + R; type "gpedit.msc" and hit Run. This should open up the Group Policy editor.
Follow the nested folders to Windows Settings>Security Settings>Local Policies>Security Options.
From in here, enable "Microsoft Network Client: Send unencrypted password to..."
Also, change "Network security: LAN Manager authentication level" to "Send LM & NTLM - use..."
These settings will help the password security between windows and linux play nicer with each other.
8.) Now, you should be ready to connect (I left out some things I believe aren't needed at all, if I'm wrong, it's just 2 more steps that I can easily add later)
Open up the network window on Windows 7 and find your computer. You should see the folder you're looking for. Upon clicking it, it should now give you a login window. From here type your credentials like this: "Computername\usernamer" and password as normal. If you don't specify the computer name of the server in the login, then it will think that it should be using a user from your computer and not linux. If you did everything right (and I'm right about not needing those 2 steps), then you should be able to share files!
If you run into any problems like not being able to transfer files to the hdd, try going back to your linux box and changing around the settings on the folder itself. You might find something in permissions that mentions that you only give Read-only access to outside users. So change it around as needed. Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment