Sharing files with Windows users via Samba

In this section, I'll walk you through setting up your very own Samba file server. I'll also go over a sample configuration to get you started so that you can add your own shares. One feature that Samba supports is integration with Active Directory, but that's outside the scope of this book as that's a feature specific to Windows Server.

I mention that here because our Samba implementation will be relatively wide open, which is a bad practice. With Active Directory, you can have more effective control over user access. But to keep it simple, we'll create a simple Samba server to get you started, and then from there, you can research more complex implementations if it makes sense to do so for your organization.

First, we'll need to make sure that the samba package is installed on our server:

sudo apt install samba 

When you install the samba package, you'll have a new daemon installed...