Newbie: how to setup network file shares (SMB)?

Software
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Well, as said above Haiku SMB client is quite limited to only v1, which is unsecure and more and more unsupported/rejected by NAS SAMBA servers.
While there is a more recent SAMBA available for Haiku, it’s not yet fully tested and needs to use userland fuse to do it.

So may I suggest that you instead try to use NFS protocol instead to access your NAS share(s) ? Most NAS support to shares over SMB/SAMBA and NFS at the same time.

The mount_nfs command won’t works with SAMBA but via NFS.
The expected syntax is the following:

mount_nfs hostname_or_ip_address_of_your_nas:/exported_folder /path/to/local/folder 0 0

Where:

  • hostname_or_ip_address_of_your_nas is the name (or IP address if it has no DNS name, like for a local home or SOHO NAS server sharing files) or your NAS.

  • /exported_folder is the NFS export “path” of your shared folder. Check you NAS NFS configuration panel to retrieve it. Usually it’s something like /nas_volume_something/some/path/to/a_folder_shared_over_NFS or more simplier just /exported_folder_name, depends on how the NAS does to expose shared folder(s) over NFS.

  • /path/to/local/folder is a path to a folder on your Haiku system, For instance, /boot/home/nfs You must create the folder first (via Tracker of via a mkdir -p /boot/home/nfscommand

  • the two trailing zeroes are for mapping the user ID and group ID into local Haiku valid value. As Haiku currently have a root user, it’s mapping to its user ID and group ID, zero in both case.

The mount_nfs command use the old NFSv2 client in Haiku, which is stable but quite slow, and will obviously works only if you NAS has NFS v2 enabled.

But you can also switch to more recent NFSv4 client available in Haiku, but as mount_nfs is harcoded to use old NVSv2 client, you have to use the more generic mount command in such case:

mount -t nf4 -p hostname_or_ip_address_of_your_nas:/exported_folder /path/to/local/folder

Or course, check your NAS has enabled NFSv4 support, not just v2 and v3.

Last but not least, you can use some GUI tools to make it easier.
Like this one for instance:

In any case, whatever the way you will use, if it doesn’t works, you needs to look for more detailed messages from kernel by checking /var/log/syslog, or even better watching it live via a tail -f /var/log/syslog command from another terminal), and share here there details. Sometimes it’s the export name which is not the correct one, sometimes it’s the server rejecting the client connection for some reason like version not supported, credentials, whatever.

Which kind of NAS do you use?

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