Foolproof file share for Windows

quiet_thinker · December 27, 2019

Hi All,

I am planning to re-use my old pc as a file server and a Plex server.

As far as Plex goes - I don't think there will be any problems.

However I am afraid about the file sharing.

For now I am planning to use Samba - however in the past I had issues creating an SMB share between my main Win 10 machine as it worked perfectly in the beginning, and after some update it just stopped working. I triple checked everything on my machine and my gf's laptop - SMB was installed, permissions were granted etc. but she just could not connect to my share anymore. For now I resorted to an FTP - but it just doesn't cut it.

That is why I would like to ask if there is maybe a better, more stable way of sharing files from a Linux server to Windows machines? (especially since 1809 update win 10 automatically deletes SMB 1.0 after 15 days if it's not used)

I just want it to work. What do you propose, are there any alternatives?

Thanks in advance

Kon-Tiki · December 27, 2019

Hi thinker,

funny enough I was having a similar problem recently. I decided to stick with SAMBA despite all instabilities, however. Eventually I didn't bother searching for a new solution as I already have some experience with SAMBA. You might want to use a LTS (Long Term Support) Linux distro tailored towards use in servers such as openSUSE or CentOS (wich both come with nice GUIs).

If you want to use something different than SAMBA, take a look at webDAV. It can be accessed from both Linux and Windows machines and you can set up a webDAV server on a Linux machine.

I hope that was of some sort of help,

Best regards,

Kon-Tiki

kendoka · December 27, 2019

I had a problem with SMB myself. My solution was to install and enable SMBv1 as it is not installed by default anymore. More info here.

Hope it helps.

GL

GardeningWithSilicon · December 27, 2019

Here's a tutorial for how to disable smb1 on linux shares:

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-configure-samba-to-use-smbv2-and-disable-smbv1-on-linux-or-unix/

The other thing you will need to do is create an account for the samba share credentials to use since windows does not allow anonymous login any more. OR, you can regedit windows so it will allow for anonymous login.