edit and share from windows10 that reside on OpenSuse directory and vice versa. basic setup how to

English Network/Internet
1

Samba Configurration GUI.
I added /home/umike/linuxtemp directory to the list within the Shares TAB.
I click ok, and I get this dialog, YaST2.
Enter the username and the password for joining the domain. To join the domain anonymously, leave the text entries empty.
Username
Administrator
password
…blank…
click, Do not Join, cancel, OK

I’ve tried leaving pwd empty with Administrator as username. I’ve tried clearing username field to be blank as well. I’ve tried putting in my Windows username and password.

The error is,
Failed to join domain: failed to find DC for domain - {Operation Failed} The requested operation was unsuccessful.

To digress, clicking the ? on the title bar of this YaST dialog does nothing. Maybe it is a bug in GUI. The pin and minimize buttons work.

So I click Cancel, all changes to Samba Config will be Lost. I’m quite confused.

  1. What am I missing in my attempts to use the GUI? I am not able to get past the OK button.
  2. on OpenSuse, can I type my windows username with @ symbol? my username is like mike@hotmail.com ?
  3. I want to share files and edit text files between 2 machines in a minimal setup, secure and normal way. So perhaps I’m lost as I feel I am turning on too many things within my system. But here in this thread, I think I have pinned it down to where I fail in the GUI.

details:
Windows 10 Home edition desktop (not in a domain, not a domain controller)
tried going into windows and mapping network drive to 192.168.1.77 (Opensuse machine), this fails.
firewall in windows is on, default
OpenSuse 15.1
disabled firewall (later on I do want to turn this on)
Allow Users to share their directories, CHECKED
Allow Guest Access, CHECKED
Samba status monitor shows nothing in the GUI
tried reading /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/README.SUS, so I ran commands,

chown root:users /home/umike/linuxtemp
chmod 1770 /home/umike/linuxtemp

tried reading Suse Enterprise desktop help, which seems very different GUI to OpenSUSE. I am beginner OpenSuse user.
tried reading, the sticky forum, https://forums.opensuse.org/content.php/199-Configure-Samba-for-Local-Lan-Workgroup, so I edited my smb.conf to say,
workgroup = WORKGROUP
netbios name = mikelinux
server string = “”
preferred master = yes
[mikeshare] /home/umike/linuxtemp
guest OK = yes
AT&T router, defaults, wired connections.
thank you.

2

This reads like you’re trying to join a domain, when actually you just want basic samba file sharing. You will need to set up a samba server on the Linux host to share files with other hosts. The essentials of that are outlined here
https://en.opensuse.org/Samba

If you have an active firewall running, you’ll need to to make sure that smb traffic is allowed. The second link above shows how to do that from a terminal, but more info about firewalld is linked to below.

https://en.opensuse.org/Firewalld

Useful References:
https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha-samba.html
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting_up_Samba_as_a_Standalone_Server

3

Marvelous. Thanks. It’s working. I think the GUI issue, if I would have stopped and restarted samba, perhaps it would have read my smb.conf. I do not know exactly why, but I can add a share through the GUI now without that dialog asking for a password, also.

  1. follow-up question is, is there a way to use fstab file and store the mount permanently, but somehow hide the password?
    I am referring to this help documentation
//ip-address/share        /path/to/mount-point    cifs    auto,username=mike@hotmail.com,password=xxxxxyyyyyzzzz,uid=umike1,gid=<users>,file_mode=0664,dir_mode=0775,iocharset=iso8859-15,vers=2.0    0    0

For gid=<users>, I tried command, id umike ,and it returns gid=100(users)
so I will try gid=100. This seems to work. And firewall is on.

From the windows angle, I then used this, https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/528500-Setting-up-openSUSE-amp-Win10-file-sharing, to let my Windows10 find stuff on the OpenSUSE machine.

4

Glad to read of your progress with this.

5

Yes, refer to ‘man mount.cifs’

credentials=filename|cred=filename
specifies a file that contains a username and/or password and optionally the name of the workgroup. The format of the
file is:

             username=value
             password=value
             domain=value

          This is preferred over having passwords in plaintext in a shared file, such as /etc/fstab . Be sure to protect  any  cre-
          dentials file properly.

BTW, you may also be interested in this thread re advertising the Linux samba server to a Windows 10 host for (WSD) discovery purposes…
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/540083-Samba-Network-Device-Type-for-Windows-10