[SOFT] SAMBA file sharing for the Raspberry Pi

tl;dr: We had completely given up on SAMBA file sharing on the Raspberry Pi with Windows network. Then Mag Pi Magazine #80 happened.

Sharing files and folders over a local network is one of the first things we wanted to do with a Raspberry Pi computer. There are many, many routers out there and many, many different default options for them. Add to that many, many outdated and sometimes conflicting tutorials on using SAMBA to share files over a network and you could understand why we moved to SSH and SFTP file transfer for a while.

Then Lucy Hattersley changed the game with her tutorial in issue 80 of the MagPi Magazine. Follow it to the letter. It works beautifully (at the moment of this writing) and even made Bee a cry a little bit.

A few extra notes in case you run into any problems while following this tutorial:

• Read through the whole article before going in: you might miss elements of the tutorial otherwise and get frustrated, and frustration often leads to mistakes.
• When you create a folder to share in your home user directory, don't use the sudo mkdir /path/to/folder/NameOfFolder command. This will attribute the folder to the root user instead of the pi and you won't have the correct permissions to work with the folder.
• Just to be sure, you can actually check which user owns a folder with the ls -l command.
• If your folder is owned by the wrong user, you can either delete it and create a new one with the correct command, or reassign ownership with sudo chown -R pi:pi /path/to/your/folder/FolderName.
• When you try to access your folders from Windows' Explorer remember to include the Raspberry Pi's username in the folder path - otherwise you won't reach anything! For example, if your Pi's IP address is 192.168.0.33 and your username is the default pi, access your shared folder with \\192.168.0.33\pi_user\shared\.
• If you create your folder inside the pi user directory, and make that user directory available, make sure to make that directory readable and writable in smb.conf! To do that, add a readonly = no line in the homes section of smb.conf.

That's it. Once we worked out the kinks listed above and made sure we were sticking to the tutorial instead of skipping ahead out of habit, everything worked like a charm. Enjoy!

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