Appliance Control: Making Things Do Stuff - Smart Home Automation with Linux and Raspberry Pi - page 41

Network Services
Having a machine on a working network is not enough to make one machine do something with another machine.
Communication needs to take place. You've already seen two services in action (DHCP and DNS), and you're
probably aware of others such as HTTP to access web sites and FTP to transfer files. For your machine to work like
this, you need to install a server of some kind. The trick is to know what kind of server is needed for any particular
task. I will introduce these servers as needed. The first that I'll show how to set up is a file-sharing server with the
ability to provide files across the local network, allowing a music collection to be situated on one machine but
playable by any other on the subnet.

N Note It is possible to make files from the internal network available externally, but I'll cover that later in this topic.

The service that makes files available is called Samba, which allows files (and printers) to be shared between
machines. Because it operates on a well-understood protocol (called SMB/CIFS), it can share these resources
between different operating systems including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. 13
It is installed in the usual way as your distribution, as shown here:

apt-get install samba

And it's configured by editing this file:

/etc/samba/smb.conf

This is used to specify which folders on the local machine are available to the other computers and under what
conditions, such as passwords or read/write privileges. Because the machine in question is on a private address range,
the files will be accessible only to local machines, so you can generally make all these folders publicly accessible
because in this context “public” means everyone in the house. Unlike a corporate network, abuse of networking
facilities in a home environment (usually by the kids!) can be covered by not providing them with any dinner!
There are many ways of configuring Samba to provide files, but the defaults are good for a home environment.
I personally add sections to share various files in three specific ways. The first provides full access to my music and
video files on my media server, such as //mediapc . These are mounted in a directory structure like this:

/media/mp3
/media/tv
/media/movies

and provided with the configuration section, like this:

[media]
comment = Media Server
path = /media
browseable = yes
public = yes
writable = no
read only = yes
guest ok = yes

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