Doing The Samba

I was trying to figure out how to get Samba working right on my PC-BSD boxes. While I was impressed with how easily it integrating into my Windows network, the happiness was only in one direction - I could copy files to the Windows machines, but I couldn't write to the PC-BSD from them. This became particularly critical when I moved one of the 160gb machines to the OS beast and needed to get some files from it. I didn't really want to figure out NFS and add Yet Another Server running, so I wanted to get Samba working in both directions.

So I used the Google-fu and found this page and followed the instructions. They're not perfect (they too need a lesson in the usefulness of 'make -p' to make a whole set of directories at once), but it led me down the gold path. I think I was just missing the "writable" flag, as that is different than "read-only" I guess.

I didn't really like the KDE Samba tool. Mainly, I wasn't sure if it restart the Samba daemons once you saved the changes, so I just edited the /usr/local/etc/smb.conf file by hand. I added this part to the Share Definitions and all seemed to work:

#============================ Share Definitions ==============================
[homes]
comment = Home directory for %u on %h
browseable = no
writable = yes
read only = no
path = /home/%u
valid users = %S

# A publicly accessible directory, that can be read from
# or written to by all valid users.
[public]
comment = %h Shared Public Directory
path = /home/samba/public
force directory mode = 0777
force create mode = 0777
force group = nobody
force user = nobody
public = yes
writeable = yes
read only = no

It's a little tricky because it the home folders aren't browseable, but it allowed me to get at the folders on my main PC-BSD machine from my other, test 1.3, PC-BSD machine and copy over a bunch of music and picture files I had on the hard drive that moved. I'm not sure what most of those options do, as the samba config file is probably second only the sendmail for complexity. But it works and I'm happy!

The main reason I did it was to copy over a bunch of digital pictures I had on the other machine, as I bought a Mustek 7in Digital Picture Frame for my mom. It works okay, but the user interface is just horrible. It doesn't find the USB key by default (although the directions imply it should), so you have to go into the setup menu to select it. And it isn't that clear how to get out of it and go back to playing a slide show. And while many of the settings are remembered if you power it off, the fact you are using a USB key (instead of the a SD, MMC, or memory stick) is not. One other important setting isn't remember either. The default is to only play the files on the stick once through, which is insane. So you have to remember to go into the settings menu and select "repeat all" to get it to just keep cycling through. Stupid setup decisions. So I'd hesitate to recommend this player, although I don't have any experience in any other one.