How do I set permissions on a network-shared folder?

Question

I used system-config-samba to expose a folder on the network with no user authentication.

But I got permission failures, so I used chmod 666 shared_folder. When I go to \\computername from a different computer (Windows), I see the Shared directory. Still, I get "You do not have permissions to access computername\Shared" when I try to access it.

What do I need to do to set these permissions?

(Xubuntu 13.10)

Answer 1

All folders need to have execute permission.

If you run ls, you'll see something like this (with no line starting with #):

$ ls -la shared_folder
drwx------   2 user group   4096 Feb 11 21:10 shared_folder
#UUUGGGOOO

If there is no x (execute) permission set, user is not able to enter the folder, or list its contents. If you want to share the folder with read and write permissions for everyone, set permissions to 777, e.g

chmod 777 shared_folder

If you authenticate remote users, and they belong to same group, you should set the permissions to

chmod 770 shared_folder

And if the folder owner is the only user using shared folder (and you have authentication set up), then

chmod 700 shared_folder

is the proper choice.

Answer 2

I believe your folder permissions have to have eXecute permissions. Try making it either 755 or 775.

Answer 3

The "force create mode" and "force directory mode" parameters force Samba to create new files and folders with the set permissions.

And you have to make sure that these folders are owned by the correct user.

Once you have created these folders they might already have the wrong permissions.

Here is the official samba doc. https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting_up_Samba_as_a_Standalone_Server