The Western Digital MyBook Live Duo is a nice cheap NAS for home use. Can be set to RAID1 for redundancy. The first nuisance I ran into was for making public shares read-only to the world and write-able to specific users. In my case I have a Music share that contains the family music library. I want this to be readable to everyone on the network, but only writable by me to make sure the kids don’t mess up the library. One option was to make it a private share and give all of the users read-only access, but then everyone needs an ID and password just to access the public read-only stuff.
The solution is some easy samba tweaks.
- Create the public share, Eg. Movies
- Turn on SSH access (instructions)
- Connect with PuTTY (or other SSH client)
- Edit /etc/samba/overall_share
- At the top of the file add:
[Global] guest account = nobody
- In the section for your share:
- Change
writeable = no
- Add
write list = {user name who can write to it}
- At the command line add the samba “nobody” user
smbpasswd -an nobody
- Reload samba
/etc/init.d/samba force-reload
So if you just go the share it will open read-only. If you authenticate 1st, but going to a private share and then to the this one, you should have read/write access. Also remember if do make any changes to that share in the Web UI then these changes to overall_share will be over written.
The samba setting where stolen from here.