How to setup a Samba share in Arch Linux

Install the required package with the following command:

sudo pacman -S samba

Samba comes with a default configuration file however you have to copy it to the correct location:

sudo cp /etc/samba/smb.conf.default /etc/samba/smb.conf

Since we want to safe the files on a external drive we have to mount it first. To do this we first need to find out the name of the drive. With the command:

lsblk

you can list all connected storage devices and it's partitions. On my setup the output looks like this:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0  3.7T  0 disk
`-sda1        8:1    0  3.7T  0 part
mmcblk0     179:0    0 29.2G  0 disk
|-mmcblk0p1 179:1    0  100M  0 part /boot
`-mmcblk0p2 179:2    0 29.1G  0 part /

mmcblk0 is the sdcard which holds the operating system of the Raspberry Pi. As you can see it's partitions are mounted to / and /boot. The drive we are interested in is called sda and holds one partition named sda1.

Now we create a folder where we want to mount the drive to:

sudo mkdir /mnt/sda1

I call mine sda1 like the partition I'm going to mount to it. To be able to write to it with the normal user we need to change the ownership with:

sudo chown -R username /mnt/sda1

Now mount the drive to that folder with:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

If you execute now lsblk again it should look like this:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0  3.7T  0 disk
`-sda1        8:1    0  3.7T  0 part /mnt/sda1
mmcblk0     179:0    0 29.2G  0 disk
|-mmcblk0p1 179:1    0  100M  0 part /boot
`-mmcblk0p2 179:2    0 29.1G  0 part /

To be able to write to it from the client you'll have to change the permissions. There might be another way to do this but I haven't found out yet how.

chmod -R 777 /mnt/sda1

This change however will only stay until the next reboot. To automatically mount the drive you have to add it to the fstab file. It's located in /etc/fstab. You can edit it with your favourite text editor. By default mine looks like this:

#
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system> <dir>   <type>  <options>   <dump>  <pass>
/dev/mmcblk0p1  /boot   vfat    defaults        0       0

Edit it so that it looks like this:

#
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system> <dir>   <type>  <options>   <dump>  <pass>
/dev/mmcblk0p1  /boot   vfat    defaults        0       0
/dev/sda1  /mnt/sda1   auto    noatime      0   0

Now the system mounts sda1 at each boot to /mnt/sda1.

To be able to use samba we need a user which has access to it. For this we need to make a linux user to a samba user. We can do this with the following command:

sudo pdbedit -a -u samba_user

I personally use for samba_user my normal user on the raspberry pi.

To be able to share a folder we have to add it to the /etc/samba/smb.conf file Open the file with a text editor and navigate to the "Share definitions" sections.

For each parent folder you want to share you have to add one definition. Here's an example definition:

[documents]
path = /mnt/sda1/documents
available = yes
valid users = samba_user
read only = no
browseable = yes
browseable = yes
public = yes
writeable = yes

After you've added all the shares you want and saved the file continue with the last step.

For the final step we have to enable and start the samba server. To enable it execute:

sudo systemctl enable smbd.service
sudo systemctl enable nmbd.service

and to start it:

sudo systemctl start smbd
sudo systemctl start nmbd

The server is now up and running and ready to use.

sudo pacman -S gvfs-smb

sudo pacman -S cifs-utils

sudo mount -t cifs //servername/documents /mnt/documents/ -o user=samba_user,password=samba_password,ip=server.ip

//servername/documents /mnt/documents cifs username=samba_user,password=samba_password,x-systemd.automount 0 0

Websites used to create this tutorial:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Samba