Networking – Access Nextcloud files via SMB/CIFS

cloudnetworkingnextcloudsamba

I want to setup Nextcloud as a secure private personal cloud. It should serve my data to different kind of devices: On the one side laptops and smartphones, where I want to simply use the Nextcloud client for syncing. But I've also a desktop computer in my LAN. Here, no local copy is needed. I even want to avoid it cause this PC have only a SSD and my Nextcloud would be about ~120GB big.

In the past I used DSM over Xpenology, which offers SMB/CIFS shares. This works well and stable on my desktop: I simply mounted the shares and evereything works good. Sadly, Nextcloud seems only able to use SMB/CIFS as external storage on the server side.

So my question: How can I access my Nextcloud files locally without cloud sync?

Thoughts about solutions

What's about WebDAV?

Basically, this seems a replacement for SMB. But from my experience from the past, WebDAV seems slow and not as stable as SMB. I think on larger files WebDAV would be slower, since it would be required to download the hole file first before it's possible to open them (WebDAV seems based on the HTTP protocol).

Update: I played around with WebDAV on Nextcloud. It was easy to configure since its buildin. But as I thought, I ran into problems: For example, a movie couldn't played over WebDAV. I Got an error "Bad file descriptor" in Nextcloud. Seems like this isn't possible using WebDAV. I would have to download the file locally first, which is more work and cause trash data on the client, when I forget to delete the local copy after watching. SMB could do this much better.

Runing Samba?

It was my first idea to simply run my own samba server. By using LDAP for Nextcloud and Samba, there wouldn't be any mess with redundant acconts for those two services. However, I would ran into another issue: Samba bypasses the Nextcloud logic. This wouln't only result in a lack of the version history. I also noticed that Nextcloud just keep track of files, that were uploaded by an Nextcloud client. Putting a file in the filesystem of Nextcloud wouldn't made them appear in the Nextcloud Web UI.

So shirking Nextcloud using a custom SMB client seems causing more problem than it's going to solve.

Best Answer

How can I access my Nextcloud files locally without cloud sync?

You don’t. That’s simply not how the service works. As you already discovered, you can indeed access the underlying storage. However, this bypasses everything Nextcloud and you might as well stop using it altogether.

Because services like ownCloud, Nextcloud or Pydio are designed to be filesystem-agnostic, they don’t rely too much on filesystem features like ACLs and metadata storage, instead implementing these features themselves. If the filesystem goes out of sync with the metadata storage, strange things are bound to happen.

Depending on your actual requirements (mainly: viewing via browser or even managing via browser) you could instead use a synchronization-only solution like syncthing. It’s Samba-friendly, too.

Then there are alternative WebDAV clients that may or may not suck less. A quick search turned up ExpanDrive, which is commercial software.

Seafile (comparable to Nextcloud) offers a “Seafile Drive client” that appears as a drive on Windows: https://blogs.seafile.com/2016/09/02/announcing-seafile-drive-client-a-new-way-to-map-seafile-storage-as-virtual-drive/

The drive client is supported in the free community edition. However, I found Seafile difficult to set up. It is much more complex compared to Nextcloud. There’s a somewhat working Docker tool available though.

Related Solutions

Windows 10 64 domain computer cannot access Linux (Raspberry Pi3) samba share

It could be that your Windows 10 client is now trying to implicitly authenticate using DOMAIN\username when you try to access the share.

Does the Raspberry Pi3 have a hostname/NETBIOS name in the samba configuration (under the global config section)? If so, you could try specifying SAMBA_NETBIOSNAME\username when you try to authenticate to access the share.

UPDATE:
Based on the config you provided I would suggest adding netbios name = pi3 or something to that effect and then trying to sign in with pi3\username.

You might also try playing with some of the other authentication settings found in the documentation for SAMBA. Note that you'll probably have to restart the samba daemon after making changes to the config.

For example, you might try adding auth methods = guest sam winbind noting that guest allows anonymous access. That way you could isolate the problem between a configuration problem and an authentication problem (assuming anonymous access would be used when you can't authenticate - I'm rusty on my SAMBA skills).

In other words, as long as you can get in with guest enabled then we know at least the v1,2,3 piece is working and you can focus on the authentication settings. Once you've finally got the settings working for non-guest access you should remove the guest access to prevent unauthorized access to your share(s).

I'd also consider adding settings to force the ntlm auth, lanman auth, server schannel, and server signing settings to mirror the settings in your Windows client.

To check the equivalent Windows settings, run "secpol.msc" and check the settings under:

Security Settings
  Local Polices
    Security Options
      - Microsoft network client: *
      - Network security: *

Microsoft network client: Digitally encrypt or sign secure channel data (always)
Microsoft network client: Digitally encrypt secure channel data (when possible)
Microsoft network client: Digitally sign secure channel data (when possible)

These settings dictate what the server schannel and server signing settings should be in your samba config.

Network security: LAN Manager authentication level

This setting dictates what the ntlm auth and lanman auth settings should be in your samba config.

For example, Send NTLMv2 response only. Refuse LM & NTLM in your Windows settings is equivalent to ntlm auth = no and lanman auth = no in your samba config.

NOTE: I don't recommend changing your Windows settings unless you're comfortable troubleshooting authentication issues with the domain afterwards.

Linux – Windows 10 cannot connect to Linux Samba shares, except from SMB1/CIFS

In my case (Windows 10, ancient Samba 4.2.10 on CentOS 6) what helped was setting the min protocol to SMB2, max protocol to SMB3:

[global]

min protocol = SMB2
max protocol = SMB3

client min protocol = SMB2
client max protocol = SMB3

client ipc min protocol = SMB2
client ipc max protocol = SMB3

server min protocol = SMB2
server max protocol = SMB3

And then connecting the share as a network drive (Explorer -> Home -> Easy access -> Map as drive), putting in the share name (\\1.2.3.4\ShareName), ticking "Connect using different credentials", then Other, and put in username in the format DOMAIN\username.

When trying to get to the share in Explorer, it would never ask for credentials, nor was I able to specify the username with net use \\shareserver\data /user:testuser (got System Error 58).