Limiting the capacity of SD cards for the pi

On this laptop, running fedora Linux, its full pathname is:

/etc/samba/smb.conf

There's a local manual page for it: running "man samba" shows the main man page, which lists a bunch of subpages, each dealing with some Samba subsystem or function, and all are accessible via the 'man' command.

Alternatively, point your web browser at

I'd suggest which way to go depends on your screen size: if its small then working with two console windows (24x80 monochrome), one for editing files etc and the other showing manpages is probably best, but if your screen is big enough to have a console window AND a web browser page open together without much overlap, then go for that.

Not everybody needs it. Of all the Linux systems I run, I think only two of them have Samba installed. Why should it be installed by default? That only increases the attack surface; any unused-but-installed software is one exploit away from getting your box pwned.

If you need it for whatever reason, you install it. If you don't, you don't. It's no different than any other software you might use: webserver, email server, etc.

True, probably.

I have :

A Router, several Synology NAS boxes, Humax Freeview recorder, and around 10 raspberry pi machines, all Linux and all have SMB server on them.

One reason why is text editing for scripts etc. I have an editor that I prefer to all others regardless of platform. This means that using a built in editor like nano is only used once to sort smb.conf.

That editor is StrongED for RISCOS.

I take your point but..

As I've said before, when people come from Windows they expect similar functionality. If there was a control panel switch to switch it on then absolutely fine, leave it off as windows does for SMB1.

Where do you draw the line? You're not safe the moment you connect to a network (SMB or not) especially a public network and as for using a browser on the net, well that's asking for trouble.

True to an extent but certainly in the windows, world you don't need to start googling for such packages and how to install them on day 1.

I note that you choose servers in your example. Yes it is SMB server that I required and yes it does offer a server service in the technical sense. But I don't consider it something that would suggest the machine running it should be in a server room as you might for web or mail servers.

It's all a question of what you're used to really.

Cheers,

Bob.

I'd be happy if Windows came with NFS support installed by default. :)

Instead I just use FTP for the rare times I still use Windows on my home LAN. I could of course complain in a Windows group that it's too hard to install NFS support so that it would work the same as my Linux systems, but I don't.

Personally I draw the line a lot tighter than most linux distributions do.

I use FreeBSD which has a minimal command line based OS as the core, largely defined by being self hosting and everything else (including X11) is a ported third party application available (usually) as a binary package or to build from source via the ports tree.

You're perfectly safe if nothing is listening or reaching out that you don't directly control.

Certainly not - after installing the iso the first step is to pull any OS updates (freebsd-update) and apply them before installing whatever packages (pkg add) I might need on the box. All with simple command line tools - I expect to have everything set up before I launch any kind of GUI and that only happens on workstations most of my systems run headless and don't have browsers (or anything else not needed) installed.

I am not a typical user.

You're also fairly safe if you've configured your LAN gateway appropriately, To me this means that you have *NO* ports in it that that accept incoming connection requests. This is the case for most services:

- FTP requests for external documents are outbound requests, so are Linux software update requests

- so are web content requests and search requests sent to search engines, unless you're hosting a website on your LAN. But IMO thats just stupid: by all means keep the master website copy on your LAN, but pay your ISP a small amount to host the public copy and use FTP or rsync (both controlled locally) to keep it in sync with your locally hosted master copy.

- Mail can be worked the same way: allow incoming mail to collect in a mailbox on your ISP's system, and every 10 minutes or so, run getmail or fetchmail to collect incoming mail from your ISP's system and pass it to a local mail server: Postfix is really easy to configure and use, and something like Evolution is an excellent mail reader/writer. Outbound mail can either be sent directly to your outbox in your ISP's server or (better IMO), sent to your local mailserver for delivery to your outbox on your ISP's server.

Almost any other requirement that involves moving data between the internet at large and systems on your local LAN can be handled safely by using a variant of one of the above schemes.

Not if you configure it properly, are using a browser like Firefox or Brave and have a copy of Lynx on hand for carefully examining possibly dodgy websites. I personally won't touch Chrome and its derivations, but YMMV.

If you go to main menu->software manager->Internet there is a 'switch to switch it on'

-- “People believe certain stories because everyone important tells them, and people tell those stories because everyone important believes them. Indeed, when a conventional wisdom is at its fullest strength, one’s agreement with that conventional wisdom becomes almost a litmus test of one’s suitability to be taken seriously.”

Paul Krugman

So would I as it happens. A long story as to why but I do use both SMB and NFS (at the same time) to access my music library for admin purposes. I've not managed to get NFS working well on Windows.

And you'd be correct and I would support you.

Ouch !!

Bob.

Just had a look at that and I can't deny what you say, it is there. Thank you for pointing it out.

Obviously, I didn't see it before and I don't recall any web site or previous message post indicating it's existence. I suppose my google efforts only finding command line install commands led me away from that possibility. I'm *slightly* at odds with putting it under "internet" as the last thing you want to do is combine those two things but perhaps that's nit picking.

Out of interest, not having a pop or anything. I discovered that the samba install I used did not provide a share option in the folder menus, so I suppose users are intended to edit /etc/samba/smb.conf themselves by hand.

I've since discovered and installed via command line caja-share samba which does add the option to the menus. I've not tried it yet but I presume it edits smb.conf for you.

For future reference, I don't suppose "the switch" in software manager adds caja-share does it?

Your message from early this morning had a profound tag message at the bottom. Both insightful and very true. I've made a note of it.

Thanks.

Cheers,

Bob.

As I said before, the underlying philosophy is utterly different on Linux. Windows will bundle and *inatall* everything and provide a numpty way to switch it on (or f*ck it up completely)

Linux has a *huge* repository of software you *might* want to use but its simply too big to install it all - e.g. I have a Gerber file viewer installed. I bet you don't even know what its for, let alone have it installed.

Likewise as regular lurkers know I have a full cross compile setup for Pi Picos.

There is a point where 'doing it like windows' simply becomes impossible. Debian (on which Mint is ultimately based)made a decisions years ago to develop the idea of a respository of precompiled software with installations scripts, like the google play or apple pay and play or whatever its called.

That part of Mint is quite recent and particular to Mint, and rather recondite. The ideas was to group all the available downloadable applications and libraries and provide a much more structured interface than synaptic.

It is very much a work in progress.

I suppose my google

I totally agree. It should be under 'networking'

TBH I am not sure.

system-config-samba is mentioned on the web as being the GUI tool to manage samba but I have never used it

Almost certainly. nearly all pretty faced GUIs merely edit underlying config files and restart the associated daemon

No idea.

Why don't you use ssh to connect? public key infrastructure, no passwords.

PS Did you ever manage to shrink your SD card?

Correct me if I'm wrong. I use samba a lot to look at scripts, and text files and the tags inside flac music files. These can be edited on another platform and returned and all using a gui not command line. I don't think you can do that with SSH can you?

It does yes.

Yes and no. Yes, I've shrunken it a bit but not to the degree it should be possible, ie. partitions a little larger than the file storage and no unallocated space. And it gave me strange sizes I didn't understand. Still looking at it and now I have a laptop running mint.

Bob.

You can if you also install sshfs. Uses ssh as the connection protocol. E.g. I have a line in (slackware) /etc/fstab:

celvi@10.0.2.3:/Users/celvi /media/celvi fuse.sshfs PasswordAuthentication=no,comment=sshfs,transform_symlinks,users,noexec,auto,allow_other,_netdev,delay_connect,identityfile=/home/chris/.ssh/id_rsa,uid=1000,gid=100,umask=0077 0 0

which connects to local windows box (at 10.0.2.3) I can double-click the icon on the desktop to open the window on the object directory. Changing a file here changes it on the host. Why would you think that samba and ssh are different in that respect? It will also be the same with NFS. All samba/sshfs/nfs do is make a remote directory appear as a local directory.

Take your SD card and plug it into the mint laptop. Use gparted (gui version of parted = partition editor) to investigate/shrink. Easy!

I'll read up about that, thanks.

Only my experiences or lack there of. I thought SSH was a command line thing.

Also, I should admit that my preferred platform of choice doesn't even have a fully working ssh client. The one it does have isn't good enough to handle sudo raspi-config output.

Ah yes, I do have an ssh client and I use it. However, I do find NFS useful but an odd system that I don't really understand if I'm honest.

I knew samba/nfs I didn't know about sshfs probably because I very, very much doubt we have a client for it.

Thanks. I'm going to have a go at that ASAP.

Cheers,

Bob.

That's PC compatibility for you.

David

There is sshfs but it is way less efficient than SMB or NFS.

You can. there is a file transfer protocol built over ssh. Microsoft supports it. I had forgotten that.

Back in the day Sun's PC-NFS made me an awful lot of money as a product :-)

Sounds like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. You'd be much better off learning to use a text editor (you could even standardize on one, such as joe) through an SSH session. It'll have a much smaller footprint on every device, takes less time to install, less time to update, etc.