How to build a dirt easy home NAS server using Samba
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A huge problem in most digital households is a growing collection of data without an easy way to share it and store it in one spot. Music. Movies. Pictures. Documents, backups, operating system images. Wow! Where do you put all of this stuff?
Youre in luck, because it is quite simple to setup a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device that any operating system can mount and write to on the network. By using Samba, you can turn a Fedora server into a common shared storage medium for Mac OS X, Linux, and Microsoft Windows. And it gets even better. With the lower cost of disk drives, it is quite possible to setup a 1-2 TB disk array as your Samba storage pool. How about that for a movie depot?!
If youre a home user, you might only care about .001% of the configuration options of Samba. Basically, you would like a volume to mount on all of the computers in your house, and you would like to use it for file sharing. This share should only be accessible to a computer on your network. For home network security, you really only need an IP restricted share without authentication. Fortunately, this is one of the easiest possible configurations.
Keep in mind that this assumes youre behind a firewall, although we will still be restricting the share to the local network. As a rule, all home networking should be done on a private network behind your firewall. The reason is simple; everyone makes mistakes and you may be in a hurry someday and skip a step and allow the whole world access to your home network.
With the security concerns behind us, lets get to work >>>







