openSUSE is a very polished, commercial-feeling distribution of Linux. The architects of the distribution have a much larger scope in mind of its usage than what I generally do. One such area is Samba, SMB or often referred to as Windows Network File and Printer Sharing Protocol. I only use this for one device on my network, my All-in-One, Printer-Scanner-Copier, The HP OfficeJet 8600. It is a fine machine that does what I need it to do very well, but for scanning to a network folder, I must use Samba.
This process used to be much simpler, many years ago, before the discovery of security issues within Samba. She short story of why there is the separation was some sort of vulnerability in the underlying system. I am sure there is a fairly simple or straight forward way to make it all work but my intent was to successfully set up Samba with as little effort as possible.
I had a resource out on the web someplace that told me how to do this simply but I couldn’t find the bookmark nor was there a link in my digital notebook so I took a few sites, what I know about openSUSE and created an easy step-by-step guide for getting Samba file sharing up and running. I have broken down the process into six easy to follow steps for a minimal setup. I use this to quickly and easily set up and use Samba with openSUSE Linux.
Six Steps to a Simple Samba Setup on openSUSE
Package Installation
Minimum number of packages required to install the Samba Server
Service Activation
System Services that need to be activated and installed
Firewall Configuration
Allow access to the server through the firewall
YaST Samba Setup
Basic configuration using openSUSE’s system configuration tool.
Adding Samba Users
Through the terminal, setting the username and password
Testing it all out
Making sure it actually works.
Final Thoughts
Samba is pretty easy to set up for a minimal usage. For something more involved and complex, there are certainly better ways of accomplishing it. Finally, if HP decided to put SFTP on their future All-in-One devices, this entire write up, to me, would be useless but until then, this is what is required.
