I’m not a Windows guy, I work with Linux and Macs. I remember there was some issue with certain versions of Windows where they couldn’t be use on a LAN to access Samba. Is that still the case? I see Windows 10 Professional and Windows 10 home 64-bit, does the “home” and “professional” have any problems with accessing Windows Networking Samba shares?
I’m asking because I am thinking of getting one of those notebook computers that run Windows 10 and I want to be able to make sure it can access the Samba share running on CentOS 7 without problems.
Samba is just the Linux implementation of SMB (Server Message Block) which has been the Windows standard since forever. All versions of Windows since at least 3.11 can access SMB.
The Home limitation is around joining a domain for unified security. A non-domain joined machine can still access a file share on a domain joined machine and vice versa.
Thanks for the info. Can you give an example of what a domain for unified security is? Is this referring to a Window Networking domain such as Workgroup?
A workgroup is an ad-hoc collection of computers on a network - they are part of the same ‘group’ only because they declare themselves as members; each member computer of the workgroup is independently/locally managed for security, permissions, etc.
A domain is a network of computers that are centrally and authoritatively controlled by a ‘domain controller’ - another computer - usually a server or a collection of servers - which can be used to impose security policies, deploy software, etc
To join a computer to a workgroup, the computer just has to advertise itself as a member; joining a domain is more like requesting and being initiated into membership. ‘Home’ versions of Windows cannot join a domain - but for the purpose of your Samba question, that doesn’t really matter
Maybe. Windows 10 defaulted SMB1 support to “off” in the Fall Creator’s Update (link). There are some older installs of Samba (or newer ones that simply re-used old configuration files) that woudn’t sucessfully interoperate with some Windows versions. This could be due to either one side or the other not implementing a feature, or both sides implementing it in different, incompatible ways. The Samba group works to fix these, but sometimes it can take until the next major release to get it going. There are workarounds - most of the problems seem to crop up at places where users aren’t allowed to change settings on their Windows boxes, and support for Linux servers is handled by a different group hidden behind several layers of “helpdesk” type people, so the main difficulty is the cat-herding, not the actual changes.
I wanted to update everyone and in case anyone else has the same situation. I was able to try out Windows 10 running on a budget laptop on the LAN to access the CentOS file server running Samba, and it is without issue. As a Samba user from Windows 10, I was able to create files, directories, delete, rename and move them around without any problem.