Troubleshooting a SAMBA Installation

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Troubleshooting a SAMBA Installation

Understanding a service well enough to troubleshoot it is an essential skill as a System Administrator. In this lab, we'll go over troubleshooting a SAMBA installation.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 25, 2025

Duration

30m

Challenge

Ensure the user is added to Samba correctly
```
pdbedit -L
```
Shows us that there are no Samba users on the system.
```
smbpasswd -a pinehead
```
Fails because there is no pinehead user on the system.
```
useradd pinehead
smbpasswd -a pinehead
pdbedit -L
```
Now we have a Samba user named pinehead. Re-running the mount command works.
Challenge

Ensure the mount is writable.
1. First, we need to add the following line to /etc/samba/smb.conf:
```
read only = no
```
1. Additionally, we need to run these commands to make sure the /opt directory (specified in the smb.conf file) is eligible for writing by pinehead through Samba.
```
chgrp pinehead /opt
chmod g+w /opt
chcon -t samba_share_t /opt
```
Once those are done, we can run systemctl restart smb and try to touch /mnt/test. It should work perfectly!

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