Preface #
Setting up a SMB server on Linux is a pain, and I don’t want to spend time configure it when I just want to transfer some malware or executable for analysis to my windows virtual-machine and shut it down completely.
I once tried to configure samba and I just couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted it to be and gave up (most likely due to the fact that I’m lazy and I didn’t wanted to read documentation). I decided to just use a simple HTTP server for transferring files and it worked flawlessly.
Recently I wanted to do some gaming and play some old video games. I decided to use windows 7 since it’s lightweight and don’t have as much bloatware as the windows 10 and 11. After installing the games, I encountered some issues with DirectX (classic, am i right?) and had to transfer some DLL files to the virtual-machine.
I didn’t want to install virtiofs drivers and
share a folder so I decided to just roll with the simple HTTP
server, but it turned out to be very slow because I had to download
different DLL’s and test them one after another (If
you’re wondering why didn’t I just connect my VM to the
internet and download them directly it’s because I
didn’t wanted to and internet explorer sucks!).
So I had this idea that why not just create a docker container with SMB and configure it for these kind of situations. Before I write it myself though just like any other sane person I decided to search the internet to see if someone already wrote such thing and It turned out that there is already a pre-configure samba docker container that I can just pull and run.
Running The Container #
It turns out running this thing is pretty simple. All I had to do was to create a shared directory in the container (i.e. Volume) and pass some argument to the container to share that directory.
docker run -it --name samba -p 139:139 -p 445:445 \
-v $YOUR_SHARED_DIRECTORY:/mount \
-d dperson/samba -p \
-s "public;/mount"
In this case I’m creating a public share, which is basically the volume that I mounted inside the container and by default it’s read-only and guest are allowed.
After setting this up, all I had to do was to just connect to the smb server through the windows file explorer and voilà, everything was working as expected!
What About Users, Permissions and Workgroups? #
The container support complex shared directories, permissions, workgroups, and more… I highly recommend you to read the project README specifically the Configuration section for more information.