Howto Share Samba With Regular User

Sometimes I need to copy over some media files to my second computer and I still like to use windows sharing for that instead of SSH. Fortunately Samba allows to share a directory quite easily (once I knew what I want) without configuring smb.conf and it is called usershares. Physically each share is a plaintext file somewhere in /var/lib/samba/usershares.

• install Samba - apt-get install samba
• option 1:
  • install sharing plugin to Dolphin (apt-get install kdenetwork-filesharing)
  • or Thunar (not sure, not in Debian, but I heard it exists)
  • open Dolphin or Thunar
  • right click on a folder
  • click Properties
  • click Sharing tab
  • share it
• option 2 (command line):
  • add user to samba - smbpasswd -a myuser
  • add share directory - net usershare add Video /home/damon/Videos "my videos" user:F n
  • later delete - net usershare delete "my videos"
  • list current shares - net usershare list
  • details about share like permissions - net usershare info "my videos"

Further reading: - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/samba, section Enable Usershares

And that’s all.