How to share files and folders with others on your home network with Samba

In the context of this tutorial we use Samba if we want to share files and folders with other computers in our private network.

One computer becomes the Samba Server. It will give the service to share data on that computer with others on the network.

Samba is already activated on ArcoLinux and ArcoLinuxB. But not on ArcoLinuxD until you run the scripts.

As a consequence any computer with ArcoLinux CAN BECOME a Samba Server.

This short and quick procedure will change your computer into a Samba Server.

Goals

  • It is the aim of this article to be NON technical
  • It is the aim of this article to provide an easy procedure
  • Created for people at home wanting to share data between computers
  • One folder is created for all purposes with read and write access
  • Give one person access to the folder with password
  • We do not make a new user account for Samba

Procedure on Your SAMBA SERVER

  1. Create a directory in your home directory with the name “SHARED“
  2. Delete all the semi-colons at bottom of /etc/samba/smb.conf
  3. Add yourself as user to Samba and set a password for access (change username)
sudo smbpasswd -a erik

In case you need to restart Samba for some reason then this is the command:

sudo systemctl restart smb.service nmb.service

Video setup

ArcoLinuxB Plasma is becoming the Samba Server.

ArcoLinux on Vmware is a desktop connection to get the files from the Samba Server aka ArcoLinuxB Plasma.

More technical info can be found on the Arch wiki.

More information about the setup in the video.

I had just completed this article on how to share a folder on the host computer with the guest computer on vmware (without samba). As a result I had this virtual machine of ArcoLinux standing by. If you want to be able to share with your whole network from within the operating system running on vmware you need to choose for a bridged network connection.