24 Jun 2012

Creating a Samba share between Ubuntu and Mac OS X

On the project I’m currently working on we have our development environment setup on a bare bones Ubuntu instance which we run via VmWare.

We wanted to be able to edit files on the VM from the host O/S so my colleague Phil suggested that we set up a Samba server on the VM and then connect to it from the Mac.

We first needed to install a couple of packages on the VM:

apt-get install samba
apt-get install libpam-smbpass

The first package is self explanatory and the second allows us to keep the samba username/password in sync with the unix user on the VM.

Installing the samba package will automatically start up the Samba daemon 'smbd'.

$ ps aux | grep smbd
mneedham 10915  0.0  0.0   7624   928 pts/14   S+   17:37   0:00 grep --color=auto smbd
root     32610  0.0  0.1  95372  5408 ?        S    Jun22   0:50 smbd -F

We then need to edit /etc/samba/smb.conf:

First we uncomment this line:

security = user

Then add a share, probably at the bottom of the file but anywhere is fine:

[mneedham]
comment = Mark's vm
read only = no
path = /home/mneedham
guest ok = no
browseable = yes
create mask = 0644

From the Mac we need to mount the share:

Go to finder
Connect to server (Cmd - K)
Type in 'smb://ip.of-vm
Select the name of the share

The share should now be accessible from the host O/S at /Volumes/name.of.share

Looking back I’m sure there’s a way to configure VmWare to share files from the guest O/S but at least I now know another way to do it as well!

About the author

I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.