Lab46 Wiki

There are several steps one must take in order to effectively set up and configure a fully functioning Samba Server.

1) The first step is going to be getting the physical machine and hard ware to use for the sambas server. This doesn't need anything particularly fancy and in many case many old machines that are “outdated” by some standards are perfectly fine or even over powered for being designated as a server machine. Although one caveat of a file server is that it will need the requisite hard drive space for whatever scale of file server that one would need. Once these hardware components are built then one can begin with the next phase.

2) For the second step one needs to format and partition the hard drives(s) on the desired machine in preparation for installation an operating system< I'm thinking Debian Linux, but any Linux distribution is capable of performing such tasks. First you have to determine the architecture of the system you are installing it on whether it be 32 bit or 64 bit and ideally you would want a headless system so you can pick any of the images that are suitable for your architecture and preferably minimal or server edition from a mirror in or near your country here: https://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/

Once you have the iso file downloaded you, for simplicity sake I'm going to call it debian.iso when in reality it might be something more like debian-8.4.0-amd64.iso or something to that effect. On a Windows machine you would need to have some kind of software to write an image to a disc like a CD or DVD, or software to write the image to a USB drive as an installer flash drive. I have seen many beginners mistakenly think that merely copying the iso file directly onto a USB or CD and then it doesn't work, the contents of the iso should be visible once completed effectively. For windows user they can download Rufus here: https://rufus.akeo.ie/ Linux and Mac users can just use the commandline to accomplish this because we're cool like that. First after inserting a USB that you want to make a bootable installer for Debian, you have to determien teh drive location of this USb drive. I personally use:

sudo fdisk -l 

to locate the USB drive as I normally don't have anything extraneous left plugged into my machines. /dev/sda is almost always the main hard disk drive, but when using this dd command one definitely wants to be sure otherwise you can wipe your very system drive out. So if I was to assume that the results of the fdisk -l command resulting in a number of /dev/sda partitions on the main system: /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2,/dev/sda3 adn then another drive: /dev/sdb1 as out USB drive. You can write to the specific partition but I almost exclusively wrute to the device as a whoel adn use a blocksize of 4 megabytes and run sync afterwards with my whole comamnd also including the path to the iso file included in if (input file) segment:

sudo dd bs=4M if=/path/to/file/debian.iso of=/dev/sdb && sync

If this is successful you should have a bootable USB drive. Now on the machine you are attempting to install Debian onto you need to make sure the BIOS settings are set for booting from a flash drive to be allowed and also that it is ahead of the internal hard drive in the boot order.

Then simply rebooting and following the guided installation as most Linux distributions typically have, you can finish up the basic vanilla installation and set a root password and install the bootloader to /dev/sda on the new samba server machine.

3) Install samba
2) For the second step one needs to format and partition the hard drives(s) on 4) Configure samba

TO DO: Clean up and expand the above list to have some actual useful info

Link back to working resume since I can't find another location for it: Matthew J. Page