Sunday, 16 August 2009

Sharing NTFS partitions with samba and Ubuntu

Sharing folders on NTFS filesystems has always been a bit of a struggle in Ubuntu.

It seems that as of Ubuntu 9.10 if you take the 'Sharing Options' route, you are now informed to add usershare owner only = false to the [global] section of /etc/samba/smb.conf.

Sounds easy... ^^

Believe it or not this is an improvement on past Gnome/Ubuntu releases.  Nevertheless, a block of jargon filled text asking a user to edit their smb.conf is a cumbersome, error prone and off-putting approach to take for a modern desktop environment.

In such a situation, surely there could be a simpler approach?  When sharing a folder on an NTFS filesystem, a simple GUI could warn of any security risks, ask for an administrator password and then make the necessary changes. 

No comments: