How to setup Samba share on Fedora Server

Setting up a Samba share on Fedora should be a fairly straightforward process. The offical Fedora documentation contains very detailed information and is a great place to start. However, I still encountered some issues which were not mentioned. In this post, I will share some of the steps that you may need to take to successfully setup a Samba share on Fedora.

Install Samba

We will follow the official documentation to install Samba. Do check this link for the latest information.

sudo dnf install samba
sudo systemctl enable smb --now
firewall-cmd --get-active-zones
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=FedoraServer --add-service=samba
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

These steps will install and enable Samba, as well as create a firewall rule to allow Samba traffic.

Create Samba user and configure share

Assuming desired Samaba user is homelab, create a Samba user with the following command:

sudo smbpasswd -a homelab

Next, we will create a share. Add the following block to /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[share]
        path = /home/homelab/share
        writeable = yes
        browseable = yes
        public = yes

You may require sudo permissions to edit the file.

Enable nmb

At this point you might notice that the share is not discoverable from other devices on the local network unlike shares created by MacOS or Windows. This is because the nmb service is not enabled by default. To enable it, run:

sudo systemctl enable nmb --now

Enable SELinux Boolean

Lastly, you may still be unable to view or access files after connecting to the share. To do so, we need to enable the samba_enable_home_dirs SELinux boolean:

sudo setsebool -P samba_enable_home_dirs on

You should now be able to find your share on the local network and access files just like any Samaba share created by other operating systems.