[Samba] Simple Samba server for "at home" - what do I need and what not?

[Rowland Penny]

On Mon, 3 Oct 2016 14:17:30 +0200
Marc Haber via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> after two decades without a dedicated file server at home, it is about
> time to have Samba.
> 
> While I am mainly a Linux guy there is a couple of systems that don't
> find rsync and sshfd adequate. We do have a handfull of standalone
> Windows 10 machines, a bunch of smartphones and a zoo of home
> entertainment appliances such as a TV, Sat receivers, IP radios/audio
> players. In addition to having Samba on this box, I do plan to publish
> parts of the audio/video achive via DLNA, so it would be a pain to
> configure the Samba server that DLNA becomes hard to build.
> 
> I would like ot have Debian jessie as operating system, which comes
> with Samba 4.1.17.
> 
> Since we are talking about at most 20 different accounts to access the
> Samba server, I'd like to avoid going AD. I am fine with having to use
> the command line to create new Samba accounts and to set file access
> privileges. I do not care about being able to use the Windows machines
> to set file access rights - those machines are unlikely to ever see
> credentials for an accout with elevated privileges on the Linux
> system.
> 
> But I would like to have different accounts with different access
> rights so that the multimedia machines do not get access to my
> financial documents.
> 
> In this environment, which samba features do I need? Which ones do I
> disable? Which ones are helpful but not really necessary? Is there
> documentation that describes this simple use-case?
> 
> Any hints will be appreciated.
> 
> Greetings
> Marc
> 

You could take a look at Amahi:

https://www.amahi.org/

I know it isn't based on debian, but it sounds just like what you are
looking for.

Rowland