Shared Folders - Samba

Hello friends,

I’m just going to set up my file shares in Samba, as far as everything works just fine, but three points would perhaps improvable:

  1. In the name of the share you can not use capital letters
  2. you can not specify a directory manuel
  3. is pleasant if you could enable or disable approvals created separately

Maybe there ever can put these ideas someone else I’ll just manually merge the changes.

But I’m still amazed at how clean and flexible running nethserver!

Thank you,

regards

Gerald

Right, I think Windows implementation of SMB protocol is case insensitive.

This is by design. All shared directory are saved inside /var/lib/nethserver/ibays which is automatically inside the backup.

Do you mean a shared folder configured but in enabled/disabled state?

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I’m using mounts ability to bind in fstab in order to place the shares where I I need them. My root partition is far to small for the amount of data I have. So in fstab I have something like this.

 /{mount}/{path}/{share name}       /var/lib/nethserver/ibay/{share name} auto    bind,gid=46,defaults    0 0

Obviously, replace the “{mount}/{path}/{share name}” with your shared folder or where you have mounted a different drive. You’ll also have to run a command fstab-update after modifying the fstab file otherwise your changes will be lost. This can be found in the development documentation.

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This is a follow on to this post, because I wasn’t sure about this communities rules on resurrecting old threads.

The tip about using mount bind to mount existing data to a shared folder was exactly what I needed.

But I also ran into the issue where Nethserver doesn’t like any capital letters in the share names. Is there a hard and fast reason for this or can it be changed.

In the post, Giacomo makes the point that the Windows implementation is case insensitive, which is fine if you only use that share in Windows or this is a brand new share. I have the situation where I need to share an existing directory, that has a capital letter in it’s name, which is used both in both Windows and Linux, and is currently stored in hundreds, if not thousands, of file location references.

Cheers.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think Linux Samba clients should not care of letter case in share names, too.

So where does the problem occur? What kind of references are you talking about? Could you give an example?

@davidep
It’s not a Linux Samba client. It’s the NS itself.

OK, the original issue I was thinking of may be a non-issue after all. :innocent: I need to do a little more checking on this.

But, another problem caused by mixing case showed up when my wife tried to play some of her music, which would lead to more problems (for me) than anything I might find. :grimacing:

iTunes runs on a Windows machine, but the music itself is stored on an array within NS, in a base directory: iTunes. We have created a large number of playlists that can be sent to an application running on NS that streams the music. These continue to work, as they were built prior to switching to NS. However, since switching, the library on the Windows side is now itunes, after switching the Windows iTunes to use the new share, because of the NS case restrictions. This means any new playlists created, by a COM based application will put itunes as the directory, which will fail when shipped to NS as that is case sensitive.

Renaming the library won’t work, because then all the original playlists will fail. I guess the temporary answer, is to use a couple of soft links to match everything up, but this is just a workaround for what I see is an arbitrary restriction in NS. Unless there is a fundamental reason why mixed case cannot work.

BTW There are some Windows programs, well at least one, made by Apple that is case sensitive on Windows. I tried to fool it con continue to store iTunes as the directory even though the share is itunes. But no, take a look at this screenshot. (Is there a way to embed these in a post. I couldn’t see one).

Cheers.

You’re right. I think we can relax the shared folder (ibay) name validator for the next release. (/cc @giacomo, @davidep, @filippo_carletti, @alep, @stephdl, @Stll0, @alefattorini)

Meanwhile we can make an experiment. How do you feel with Bash? Just rename itunes => iTunes and fix the shared folder name into the DB, with

# mv /var/lib/nethserver/ibay/i{t,T}unes
# sed -i 's/^itunes=/iTunes=/' /var/lib/nethserver/db/accounts

I hope your wife will like this improvement! :blush:

No problem with resurrecting old threads if you remain on the same topic :full_moon_with_face:

As long no Microsoft compatibility issues arise, we can relax the validator :smile:

@davidep
Thank you. That works.

@alefattorini
Just wasn’t sure. Some boards frown on it.

Cheers.

A bit OT, but I mean that each service provided should have its relevant database, it is boring that you cannot use a name for an user because it is taken by an ibay…Obviously this can be done for NS7, a bit tricky to do it on a working system.

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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Permit to have the same name for shared folders and user/group

2 posts were split to a new topic: Question about shared folders

@gerald_FS have we implemented some requests from you? Please take a look

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A post was split to a new topic: Cannot have a capital letter in a share