My Raspberry Pi's main purpose is to host a raid array. It does that more or less fine, though it took me a while to find a stable enough powered USB hub to host the pair of external hard drives.
To server the files to the rest of my network I connect to the Pi via sshfs on the client computer. This has the benefit of not needing me to do anything else on the Pi, though it means installing sshfs on the client systems. A downside is that sshfs is not supported natively on the Macs that I am connecting to the Pi with, and I need to make sure I keep sshfs working whenever e.g. a new update happens to the Mac OS. sshfs is also an encrypted protocol, yet I don't necessarily want the overhead of encryptic massive media files which is what I usually access from the raid array. Authentication would be nice, but encryption of the data is not really necessary in my case.
So, I'd like to set up a samba server, which is the Windows files sharing protocol that will allow me to mount the raid data on the Pi as a shared drive on an other machine (be it Windows, Mac, Linux, or my Android tablet).
I'm going to follow the official raspberry pi site to install and run samba. I will document what I do here so that I can refer back to it.
The first step is to install samba via:
sudo apt install samba samba-common-bin smbclient cifs-utils
doing this and saying 'yes' to the confirmation to go ahead proceeds as expected and the software installs.
Next, I jump to the "Sharing a folder for use by Windows" section of the above web page. I already have a folder to share, which in my case is /mnt/raid. So I edit the file /etc/samba/smb.conf and add the following to the end:
path = /mnt/raid
read only = no
public = yes
writeable = yes
I follow the suggestions of the web page, but that's all fine as I want the drive to be freely available to users on my home network.
There is also a suggestion to change the workgroup setting to agree with my home Windows networt. Since this is the first thing to use my home windows network, I generate a new name for the workgroup:
Saving the file appears to be enoug for samba to pick it up, and indeed I can see a directory called "share" on my Mac:
Note that "ah-satan" is the name of my Raspberry Pi. (It's my wife's name, backwards)
success!
