Ubuntu – Samba share external USB device

12.04ntfssamba

I managed to share stuff from my Ubuntu 12.04 to my private network, and the data is visible from a Windows machine. I even shared a hdd that has windows on it. So everything seems to work fine.

When I want to share a mounted device (USB pen drive, USB HDD… etc) however, I get from the Windows machine: Access denied on file \…

I realize that this is due to the missing rights on the mounted folder. By default a mounted folder gets the equivalent of 700 : drwx——, and the owner myself. But, I can't seem to change the rights on the external device… they remain 700.

Is there a special trick I need to do in order to share NTFS mounted usb devices?

Thanks

P.S. from this Question I see that NTFS devices can not be shared….is this true? It's a bit strange, because I have in my PC 2 HDD's with 3 NTFS partitions, and I can share them without a problem.

Best Answer

I found the solution, if anybody cares:

The external NTFS drive mounts with me as owner and with 700 permissions, meaning that only I can access it. I found a tip on the ubuntu forums from Morbius1 that I can force the incoming connection to look like me by adding the following line in /etc/samba/smb.conf, in the shared section:

force user = your-user-name

It works great.

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gparted (GNU Partition Editor) is a good graphical tool for formating drives to a variety of different filesystem types. You can install it with sudo apt-get install gparted.

Just as when you are using Disks, be very careful that you are making changes to the correct device. You can format your device to NTFS using the following steps:

Select the correct device from the dropdown selector on the top right.
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