18.4 Configuring the smb.conf File

Earlier versions of Fedora included a user friendly graphical tool named system-config-samba to assist in the configuration of Samba. In recent versions, however, this tool has been removed. This means that the Samba environment must be configured manually within the /etc/samba/smb.conf file and using the smbpasswd command-line tool. While the loss of system-config-samba may be mourned by those who relied on it, the tool’s simplicity actually masked many of the more advanced features of Samba. In practice, much more can be achieved by taking the time to understand the intricacies of the smb.conf file.

Samba is a highly flexible and configurable system that provides many different options for controlling how resources are shared on Windows networks. This flexibility can lead to the sense that Samba is overly complex to work with. In reality, however, many of the configuration options are not needed by the typical installation, and the learning...