Samba Server Installation and Configuration on CentOS 7

This tutorial explains how to configure a Samba server on CentOS 7 with anonymous & secured samba shares. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients like Windows. Samba is freely available, unlike other SMB/CIFS implementations, and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.

1 Preliminary Note

I have a fresh installed CentOS 7 server, on which I am going to install the samba server. Off-course you need to have one windows machine to check the samba server that must be reachable with the CentOS 7 server. My Centos 7 server have hostname server1.example.com & IP as 192.168.0.100

Note:

• The Windows machine must be on same workgroup. To check the value in windows machine run the command at cmd prompt

net config workstation

It will be like this:

Your windows machine must be at same Workstation domain as in CentOS 7.0 server, i.e. WORKGROUP in my case.

• To make the Windows machine reachable in Windows proceed like this. In the run terminal & add  the entry of your server IP address:

notepad C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

In my case it was like this, just save the values.

[...]
192.168.0.100 	server1.example.com	centos

2 Anonymous Samba sharing

First I will explain the methodology to install Samba with an anonymous share. To install the Samba software, run:

yum install samba samba-client samba-common

It will install the current Samba version from the CentOS software repository.

Now to configure samba, edit the file /etc/samba/smb.conf. Before making changes, I will make the backup of original file as  /etc/samba/smb.conf.bak

cp -pf /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.bak

As I want to start with an empty file, I'll use the cat command to empty smb.conf. That's faster than deleting all the lines in vi.

cat /dev/null > /etc/samba/smb.conf

Further, give the entries like this

vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
server string = Samba Server %v
netbios name = centos
security = user
map to guest = bad user
dns proxy = no
#============================ Share Definitions ============================== 
[Anonymous]
path = /samba/anonymous
browsable =yes
writable = yes
guest ok = yes
read only = no

mkdir -p /samba/anonymous
systemctl enable smb.service
systemctl enable nmb.service
systemctl restart smb.service
systemctl restart nmb.service

Further CentOS 7 Firewall-cmd will block the samba access, to get rid of that we will run:

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=samba

[root@server1 ~]# firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=samba
success
[root@server1 ~]#

 Finally, reload the firewall to apply the changes.

firewall-cmd --reload

[root@server1 ~]# firewall-cmd --reload
success
[root@server1 ~]#

Now you can access the Centos 7 share in Windows as follows. Go to the Run prompt and type \\centos:

\\centos

From a Windows machine, just browse the folder and try to create a text file, but you will get an error of permission denied.

Check the permission of the shared folder.

ls -l

drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 Jul 17 13:41 anonymous
[root@server1 samba]#

To allow access by the anonymous user, set the permissions as follows:

cd /samba

chmod -R 0755 anonymous/
chown -R nobody:nobody anonymous/

ls -l anonymous/

total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nobody nobody 6 Jul 17 13:41 anonymous
[root@server1 samba]#

Further, we need to allow the SELinux for the samba configuration as follows:

chcon -t samba_share_t anonymous/

Now the anonymous user can browse & create the folder contents.

You can cross check the content at the server also.

ls -l anonymous/

total 0
-rwxr--r--. 1 nobody nobody 0 Jul 17 16:05 anonymous.txt
[root@server1 samba]#

3. Secured samba server

Therefore, I will create a group smbgrp & user srijan to access the samba server with proper authentication.

groupadd smbgrp

useradd srijan -G smbgrp

smbpasswd -a srijan

[root@server1 samba]# smbpasswd -a srijan
New SMB password:<--yoursambapassword
Retype new SMB password:<--yoursambapassword
Added user srijan.
[root@server1 samba]# 
    

Now create a folder with the name secured in the /samba folder and give permissions like this:

mkdir -p /samba/secured

Again we will have to allow to listen through SELinux:

cd /samba
chmod -R 0777 secured/
chcon -t samba_share_t secured/

Again edit the configuration file as :

vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

[...]
[secured]
 path = /samba/secured
 valid users = @smbgrp
 guest ok = no
 writable = yes
 browsable = yes

systemctl restart smb.service

systemctl restart nmb.service

Further, check the settings as follows:

testparm

[root@server1 samba]# testparm 
Load smb config files from /etc/samba/smb.conf
rlimit_max: increasing rlimit_max (1024) to minimum Windows limit (16384)
Processing section "[Anonymous]"
Processing section "[secured]"
Loaded services file OK.
Server role: ROLE_STANDALONE
Press enter to see a dump of your service definitions <--ENTER

[global]
	netbios name = CENTOS
	server string = Samba Server %v
	map to guest = Bad User
	dns proxy = No
	idmap config * : backend = tdb

[Anonymous]
	path = /samba/anonymous
	read only = No
	guest ok = Yes

[secured]
	path = /samba/secured
	valid users = @smbgrp
	read only = No
[root@server1 samba]# 

Now at windows machine check the folder now with the proper credentials

You will again face the issue of permissions to give write permission to the user srijan do:

cd /samba
chown -R srijan:smbgrp secured/

Now samba users have the permissions to write into the folder. Cheers, you have done with samba server in CentOS 7 :)