How to share files with windows 7 and up?

[Red Squirrel]

Samba only seems to work for XP and below. Is there a way to share files with 7, 2008 and newer Windows OSes?

I hate having to store data directly on a system/VM, it just makes backups harder. I want to store it on my central file server and just have a share. I have a few servers that need to run in Windows. Worse case scenario I'll just have to go back to windows 2003 server but it would be nice to get it to work in 2008.

What about NFS, any way to get that to work in Windows?

 

[Jovec]

Samba still works on 7 and 8/8.1. It's likely a config or version issue with samba itself.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Managed to get it to work in 2008. It seems the browseable flag has to be set to true for it to work, which is odd, because all that really means is that it's not viewable in the list. I just did not want to clutter the list with a share that is specific for one machine but not really a huge deal. I'm still fighting with windows 7 though and another machine. I've never seen it work in 7.

 

[Ken g6]

Samba works fine for me in Windows 7 if accessed properly. Open Explorer, go to \\COMPUTER\Share, enter your username and password, and you should get access. Don't go for deeper files until the base share is accessed.

Note that in my case the username/password on the Windows machine never seems to be the same as the username/password on the Samba server. YMMV.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Still can't get it to work in Windows 7. I type in \\computername and just get access denied no matter what user/pass I put. I know it's valid because I could get it to work in Linux. I tried putting workgroup\ servername\ too, no go. It just keeps refusing.

Samba also has very poor logging so that's not much help either. Oddly debian does not have a /var/log/secure file either. I figured maybe something would go in there.

Just noticed there's something in 7 called a homegroup, do I need to do anything having to do with that? Guessing Samba has to support those as well? It seems to me in 7 it's a completely different system.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Ok so it seems to work with CentOS, but not with Debian. I'm thinking this is because of SeLinux, but I can't find /boot/grub/grub.conf so I can add selinux=0 in the kernel start flag. How do I disable selinux in Debian? If it even has it? If not, is there something else that could be screwing around with Samba?

Edit: bah going to reinstall and put CentOS on this server. Was going to try to do an update, they already pulled off all the repositories for this version. There was not much to setup on this server anyway, it's just going to be a file server for the church.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Yeah, CentOS 6.x is probably a much better choice for a simple setup that just needs to run and be stable (so you don't have to constantly come and "fix it").

 

[Cerb]

It's nothing to do with SELinux (barf). However, I would not use Debian. Been there, done that, had an update replace config files and ruin it. CentOS, SUSE, and specialized distros are definitely better choices. You would not do poorly to use something like Zentyal, for instance, purely as a NAS.

There are a few settings you need set that are not defaults on most distros, to get the server showing up and working, if it's not a DC. I forget what they are off the top of my head, but there's documentation for both CentOS and SUSE on setting it all up, 10 different ways, across the 'net .