Sharing an external hard drive in Ubuntu using Samba

Question

/media/MYDISK is where my hard drive is mounted automatically. I created a symlink using:

ln -s /media/MYDISK /home/camilo/MYDISK
chmod 777 /home/camilo/MYDISK

I'm setting up smb.conf like this:

[myshare1]
comment = external disk
browsable = yes
path = /home/camilo/MYDISK
guest ok = yes
read only = no
create mask = 0775

Also, in the [global] section I tried adding the following lines:

follow symlinks = yes
wide links = yes
unix extensions = no

The problem is that when browsing the shared folder in Windows 7, I get a "\\etc\myshare1 is not accessible" error. When pointing the path to a regular folder it works fine. Also, when I point it directly to /media/MYDISK, it shows the same error.

EDIT: to make it more interesting, I have no graphical interface, so I need to touch the config files directly..

Answer 1

I had the same problem, and I resolved it by mounting the external drive manually with my user (i.e. not root).

Answer 2

edit /etc/samba/smb.conf to include force user = yourLogin in the [global] section

from this thread, worked for me:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1710811