Share pluggable disks with udisks-glue on Samba

These scripts help having Samba shares on removable drives. This HOWTO should fit with any Raspberry Pi, although any modern linux should do the trick. You will need the samba and udisks-glue packages. Indeed all commands beginning with a # should be executed as the root user. So, begin with :

# apt-get install samba udisks-glue
# systemctl enable nmbd

Now, to have udisks-glue work with user pi, you need a polkit rule allowing it

• see in src for a basic rule allowing the plugdev group to mount and unmount removable drives.

Then you will have to autostart udisks-glue for the user specified in smb.conf. An option is to make a systemd service file ; see the one included in src. You would just need to enable it with

# systemctl enable samba-glue.service

Finally you need a samba share on /media. You could use the smb.conf example in src. It only lets user samba access to the shares on behalf of user pi. You'll also need to add him in and give it a password :

# useradd -s /bin/false -d /dev/null -g sambashare samba
# smbpasswd -a samba

All this is summed up in the install-samba-glue.sh script.

Last word, how do you get things unmounted ? Well the simplest option is to turn the server off. But you could also use lighttpd with mod_cgi enabled, and the admin script in src/usr/lib/cgi-bin/drives.py. For this to work, you'll need a special sudo rule to let user www-data use eject on behalf of user pi. You will find the needed files in src :

/etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-cgi.conf
/etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi.conf
/usr/lib/cgi-bin/drives.py
/etc/sudoers.d/011_www-data-eject