Setting Up Samba on a Raspberry Pi
Table of Contents
Samba is one of the go-to protocols for sharing files over a network.
It is builtin to Windows, but needs to be installed and configured on other OSes like Linux and macOS.
Thankfully the process is not too difficult.
Installing on Rasbian #
Run the following command on your Pi to install a samba server and client onto your Pi.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install samba samba-common-bin smbclient cifs-utils
Checking the smb server #
To check the status of your smb server, use:
systemctl status smbd
Configuring Samba #
Making a user #
Samba users are different from Unix/Linux users, so we must create a new user
with the smbpasswd command
sudo smbpasswd -a pi
It should ask for a password for the new user before adding them
Network Shares, Permissions configuration #
The main configuration file for samba is located at /etc/samba/smb.conf. This
is where you configure which folders/files are shared, what permissions they have (client side),
whether they are public, and more.
Let’s assume you have a folder /home/pi/share that has files you want to share.
You can create this by doing mkdir -m 1777 /home/pi/share
If you wanted samba to share this directory, you would need something like this
in your smb.conf:
...
[share]
path = /home/pi/share
writeable=Yes
create mask=0777
directory mask=0777
public=no
Note: always make sure to restart samba after changing configurations
systemctl restart smbd
Mounting a smb share on Linux #
mount -t cifs -o username=pi //<ip of server>/myshare /mnt/share
Mapping a smb share as a drive on Windows #
With File Explorer #
Open File Explorer
Click “This PC”
In the ribbon view click “Map network drive”
- Enter
\\<ip of server>\sharefor the folder (you can do this in File Explorer too)
Enter the user and password credentials setup earlier
The share should be mapped
With CMD.exe #
net use Z: \\<ip of server>\folder
With PowerShell #
New-SmbMapping -LocalPath 'Z:' -RemotePath '\\<ip of server>\folder'