Setting Up Samba on a Raspberry Pi

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

1. Open File Explorer

2. Click “This PC”

3. In the ribbon view click “Map network drive”

4. Enter \\<ip of server>\share for the folder (you can do this in File Explorer too)

5. Enter the user and password credentials setup earlier

6. 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'