Everyone has a smart phone in our house, alteast one smart TV and a one laptop or computer.
Things we do most of the time:
- Take photos in mobile transfer to computer for backup
- Download some video and transfer to Mobile/PC
- Share media or photos with Siblings or Parents
- Play those media in Smart TV
One of the boring task. Can we make it interesting ?
We need something that can act as middle man to store the stuff and can be accessed from any device.
Solutions:
- SMB (Secure Message Block) protocol
- NFS (Network File System)
So let's try to do a POC on SMB. The SMB in linux side called SAMBA (Open source implementation of SMB)
POC
Installing samba server in Ubuntu
sudo apt install samba
Configuring samba Configuration
- Tell samba server which folder to share.
- Who have permission to read/write.
- Template of /etc/samba/smb.conf
[NAME] Configuration
- My Config
[Public]
comment = Samba on Ubuntu
path = /home/sample/Public
read only = no
write list = ayan
browsable = yes
guest ok = yes
[Videos]
comment = Samba on Ubuntu
path = /home/sample/Videos
browsable = yes
guest ok = yes
- In the above config only user ayan has permission to write file in public folder
- For Videos folder no one has write permission.
- Samba shared folders can be accessed by Guest (any one in the network) or Authenticated user.
- Let's see how we can create user for samba authentication.
sudo useradd ayan -s /sbin/nologin
- The above user creds cannot be used to login in to your linux system
because of
-s /sbin/nologin - Check if your user added to your system
sudo cat /etc/passwd
- Set samba password for your user
sudo smbpasswd -a ayan
- All done
- Restart the samba server
sudo service smbd restart
Debugging
- Cheking the service
sudo service smbd status
- smb config debug
sudo testparm
Pros
- All you need is VLC media player software or SMB Client.
- You can play the media in the shared folders.
- If you have SMB client you can copy new files or delete existing files.
One of my favorite quote
Solution to problem creates new problems
Cons
- Device should be Alive.
- We can use Raspberry PI which takes less power and do more than what we need
- Synology sells hardware that does similar things.
- Devices need to be same network
- Most of us basically connects to same network (Wifi Router)
- You can enable hotspot in any device and connect the rest of the device you need to shared.
- Not able to access it through Internet.
- We can set up software such as Tails or Zeronet through which we can access your home server from internet.
Resources
- Ubuntu official