X-post from reddit, Sharing media headaches: Samba won't show "new?" media, and can't figure out multiple user auth in NFS. SFTP on Windows? Help... ( kbin.social )

e0qdk , 9 months ago

files that I added shortly after setting up Samba and getting it running are simply not showing in client systems.

Hmm... Some initial questions to help with debugging:

• Have you checked the logs (both samba logs and system logs) to see if there are any messages that might be relevant to what's going on?
• Are the new files showing up correctly on the system hosting the shares (when you access directly on that system)?
• If you stop samba (instead of restarting it), do the shares actually become inaccessible -- as expected?
• What happens if you modify/rename a (preferably unimportant!) file that does show up currently? Can clients see the change?
• What distro are you running on the system hosting the shares?

thanevim OP , 9 months ago

Thanks for responding!

So I don't know what file access logs I should look at. All the samba logs have essentially had nothing at all in them except for variations on [2023/09/28 23:50:31, 0] ../../source3/rpc_server/rpc_worker.c:1125(rpc_worker_main) rpcd_winreg version 4.18.6 started. Copyright Andrew Tridgell and the Samba Team 1992-2023

so it doesn't seem like they're going to be of any help here...

The new files do show and launch on the server itself just fine.

Stopping samba does produce the expected timeout errors on clients

Renamed file does show as renamed. Bonus, a new file I created on the server from context menu "New text file" entry does also show on clients

Server is running on Fedora Linux 38

e0qdk , 9 months ago

Renamed file does show as renamed. Bonus, a new file I created on the server from context menu "New text file" entry does also show on clients

Hmm... so what's different about the files that don't show up? If we can figure that out, that may point to the solution... Were they created in a notably different way (e.g. uploaded from a client)? Are they symlinked into the directory? Are they named in a notably different way? Very different in size? You've said you've already checked file permissions, but what about the actual owner/group -- are they the same as the files that do show up?

Is SELinux (or some other security software) running and doing something weird maybe? For Fedora, I think there would be a log entry at /var/log/audit/audit.log if something is getting blocked due to a security policy, but I don't run Fedora personally.

thanevim OP , 9 months ago

Turns out, yes it was. For Samba shares, SELinux requires every file to have the sudo semanage fcontext --add --type "samba_share_t" command run on it. And of course, the new files wouldn't have had this like the ones that were present when I was setting up Samba...

I expanded my search to making a post on the Fedora forums, where an @/glb pointed out that fact, and thankfully was able to also state that adding it to fstab for the drive will automate that process at boot. So the issue is now solved, thanks to glb over here: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/file-sharing-woes-samba-nfs-sftp/91112/13