Shared Storage Idea

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