RedHat based distro's (Fedora, Centos, etc) have a very simple menu
application for configuring samba shares. I found a similar gui
application for Debian based distro's called "system-config-samba" that
can be installed via apt.
I have found that setting the Samba Server Authentication Mode to
"Share" is the simplest setup. The owner/group and mode of the share
directory will be enforced. This works great for browsing shares.
However it is not a complete solution for shares that are mounted on
your file system.
If you mount the share(s), then the user accounts become a factor. By
user account it is really the user ID number that is enforced at both
the client and server machines. If you what to minimize the pain here,
create user accounts on the server with the same ID numbers that are
used on the Clients. The user ID numbers of both the client and server
accounts must be identical but also unique. This is true for both SAMBA
and NFS shares!
Now if the Client machines exist before the Server is built and
installed, then most likely all the Client machines, if they have the
same distro installed, will have identical user ID numbers but have
different user names assigned. This will be the case since distros
create users starting at a preset ID offset. For example Debian style
distro's start the user accounts at id=1000 and Red Hat distro's start
at id=500.
In my case, my home file server existed before the client machines and
it was based on RedHat 7.3 the user ID's were originally created as 500,
501, 502 and etc.
500 = lee
501 = barbara
502 = kristeen
,,
As a result, all my Ubuntu desktop and laptop computers have user
accounts with ID's forced to match the file server user account ID
numbers. For example, on my computer(s) I am ID=500, my wife's is
ID=501, and Kristeen is ID=502.
One alternative to maintaining a strict set of unique ID's across the
network might be to install an additional authentication server on the
file server.