How to Use SAMBA on Amazon S3 Mounted Directory

amazon s3s3fssamba

I had successfully configured a SAMBA share on /home/myusername on an Ubuntu 17.10 VM. I then used s3fs-fuse to mount an S3 bucket on that exact directory, i.e. /home/myusername. It worked too, any files I created in this directory were created in my S3 bucket.

However, I am no longer able to access my samba share. I am able to connect to the SAMBA server and connect to other shares, but not the one on /home/username. It shows

Windows cannot access \IP-Address\share.

You do not have permission to access \\IP-Address\share. Contact your network administrator to request access.

I could assume that, on mounting the S3 bucket, the username used to connect to SAMBA lost access permissions to the directory, but that seemed unlikely, as the directory is the home directory of the user.

Since SAMBA uses its own userbase instead of the system user accounts, do I need to grant permissions to some other user also?

Best Answer

Solved the problem. By default s3fs blocks other users from accessing the bucket. Had to make two changes:

Uncomment user_allow_other in /etc/fuse.conf
While mounting, add -o allow_other in the command

s3fs bucketname /local/path -ourl=https://s3.amazonaws.com -o allow_other

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Ubuntu – How to setup samba share to be mounted as specific user

ok, i've re-read your question and have another answer.

when you mount it in /etc/fstab or with sudo mount from the command line, you need to set the uid and gid and optionally the umask too (file_mode and dir_mode) so that local users on the client can use the share. otherwise, it will default to being owned by root and W only by root. and it probably doesn't hurt to explicitly mount it as RW.

sudo mount -t cifs //myserver/myshare /media/remote-share \
  -o rw,user=henry,uid=xxx,gid=yyy

where xxx and yyy are the local (local to the client, that is) user and group that should "own" the share when it is mounted. if it's only one local user that needs access, the gid probably doesn't matter. if multiple local users need access, then the gid has to be set and every local user who needs access has to be a member of that gid.

there are other options that may need to be set, depending on your network setup (e.g. you may need to specify the domain). see the manpage for mount.cifs(8) for more details.

BTW, see the notes about credentials file if you're mounting it from /etc/fstab. fstab is world-readable so not a good place to put passwords. a credentials file can be owned by root, mode 600.

Samba – Apache unable to access mounted Samba share

Ok, I figured this out. The problem was SELinux.

The policy httpd_use_cifs was set to off. I was able to see this by running:

getsebool -a | grep httpd

Then I saw that httpd_use_cifs --> off. All that was left to do was change the policy:

setsebool -P httpd_use_cifs on

Note: the -P flag writes the policies to disk so they will persist through reboots. You can omit the -P flag to temporarily test your policy change without committing it to disk.

Best Answer

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