Blog / Configuring Samba 5 to share a folder with full write permissions to guest users

This year I bought a Raspberry Pi to serve as a retro emulation box. It stinks.

Not anyone’s fault, really. The hardware just doesn’t have the power to run SNES games like Super Mario World at full speed. Anything NES and below is fine, as long as you’re using wired controllers.

So I turned the device into a file server using Raspbian and looked into configuring Samba 5 to allow anyone on my network to read and write files without a password.

It looked like this:

The Mappa dell'Inferno (Map of Hell) by Botticelli, regularly called The Abyss of Hell or La voragine dell'Inferno. The Map of Hell parchment shows the geography of hell in the classical funnel section, which was used in later iconography. The parchment was painted by Botticelli between 1480 and 1490, with the technique of the silver tip.

After hours of Googling and Stack Overflowing, I found my answer. I’m using an external hard drive mounted to /mnt.

Here’s what you need to put at the bottom of /etc/samba/smb.conf to enable anonymous guest users to read and write to a folder. Change path to whatever folder you’re tring to share.

[Storage]
	comment = External drive
	path = /mnt
	admin users = pi
	create mask = 0777
	directory mask = 0777
	force group = root
	force user = root
	guest ok = Yes
    read only = No