Dan Benamy

I spent a huge amount of time trying to set up a samba share that was password protected and writable. It’s amazing to me that such a basic use case isn’t well supported using the gui and was so poorly documented. Ben was nice enough to listen to me rant about Ubuntu, Fedora, Gnome, FreeNas, Unetbootin, and more.

This is on Ubuntu 9.04 (Gnome).

• Install samba, open firewall, etc.
• sudo smbpasswd -a someuser to manually create the account for samba because automatic account sync with the system accounts didn’t work.
• net usershare info to show user shares (those created by non-root users; these are what gnome’s nautilus creates).
• net usershare add music /home/someuser/Music/ "" someuser:F
• It may take a few seconds to take effect.
• http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/net.8.html for more info on the net command.

Update Oct 25, 2011: You still need to create the samba user in Ubuntu 11.04.