Mapped Network drive

Allowing yourself to map folders of your server as network drive makes it very easy to read and write to your server from another computer over your home network.

To accomplish this, we can use a service called samba.

Step 1: Install Samba

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install samba

mkdir -p /srv/shared
sudo chown -R :<group> /srv/shared
chmod -R 770 /srv/shared

Note

You don't need to run mkdir if the folder already exists. The chmod command does the following: chmod: Stands for "change mode," a command in Unix and Unix-like operating systems to change the access permissions of files and directories. -R: Recursively changes the permissions of the specified directory and its contents. 770: Assigns read (4), write (2), and execute (1) permissions to the owner and group. In total, it grants full read, write, and execute permissions to the users and group.

Tip

To create a linux user

sudo adduser <username>
To create a group

To create a group

sudo groupadd <group>
To add a user to a group

To add a user to a group

sudo usermod -aG $GROUP $USER

Step 3: Configure Samba

Edit the Sasmba configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Add this at the end of the file:

[SharedFolder]
  path = /home/your_username/SharedFolder
  read only = no
  guest ok = yes

Tip

Setting guest ok = no will make it such that a valid Samba user will need to provide their credentials to access the mapped drive.

Step 4: Restart Samba

sudo service smbd restart

Step 5: Create a Samba User

This user needs to be an existing Ubuntu user:

sudo smbpasswd -a your_samba_username

Step 6: Allow access through firewall

If firewall is enabled on the Ubuntu machine, allow traffic for the Samba app.

sudo ufw allow Samba

Info

To check the firewall status run

sudo ufw status

To activate the firewall run

sudo ufw enable

To view available applications you can enable

sudo ufw app list

Step 7: Access from Windows

You should now be able to open an explorer instance on a Windows machine on the network and access \your_ubuntu_ip\SharedFolder

Tip

To find your Ubuntus ip address, run

ip addr show