Share Ubuntu Home Directories using Samba

Samba Server allows you to share the home directories of users automatically. This can be useful so that you don’t have to manually create every share for every user.

First, make sure that you’ve installed Samba server.

To share the home directories, open up smb.conf with the following command:

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

Find this section of the file, and make it match the following:

#==================ShareDefinitions================#

Un-comment the following (and tweak the other settings below to suit)
# to enable the default home directory shares. This will share each
# user’s home directory as \\server\username
[homes]
comment = Home Directories
browseable = yes

# By default, \\server\username shares can be connected to by anyone
# with access to the samba server. Un-comment the following parameter
# to make sure that only “username” can connect to \\server\username
valid users = %S

# By default, the home directories are exported read-only. Change next
# parameter to ‘yes’ if you want to be able to write to them.
writable = yes

Now you should be able to map a drive on windows using the following share format:

\\ubuntumachine\username

For example, if the Ubuntu machine is named koko-ubuntu, and the username is data, your share path would be \\koko-ubuntu\data