[Samba] Lost remote access to /

[Paul D. DeRocco]

For a long time, I've had a share set up on my Samba server (Ubuntu 14.04)
that gives me read/write access to /. (It's a machine that does Yocto
Linux builds, nothing proprietary on it.) I routinely accessed it from a
couple of Win7 boxes and one Mac. A few days ago, I installed some Ubuntu
updates, and suddenly the share stopped working. I could open the machine,
and I could open the share and see all the first level directories and a
few files, but I'd get an error like "Windows cannot access
\\BUILD\all\home" when I tried to open the home directory. I get analogous
errors on the Mac, too.

I tried adding "force user = root". I tried "smbpasswd -a root" to supply
the root password. I tried adding "valid users = root". If I share
anything other than /, then it works fine. What could have changed all of
a sudden? Was there a global policy change in Samba that rules out sharing
/, that suddenly appeared in that fatal update?

Here's my smb.conf (with the printer stuff and comments stripped):

[global]
   workgroup = WORKGROUP
   netbios name = BUILD
   server string = %h server (Samba, Ubuntu)
   name resolve order = lmhosts wins bcast hosts
   dns proxy = no
   log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
   max log size = 1000
   syslog = 0
   panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d
   server role = standalone server
   passdb backend = tdbsam
   obey pam restrictions = yes
   unix password sync = yes
   passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u
   passwd chat = *Enter\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n
*Retype\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *password\supdated\ssuccessfully* .
   pam password change = yes
   map to guest = bad user
   usershare allow guests = yes
[all]
   comment = Everything
   read only = no
   path = /
   browsable = yes
   create mask = 755
   force user = root
   valid users = root

The last two lines weren't there when it last worked.

-- 

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco at ix.netcom.com