cdzombak/samba-docker repository overview

⁠samba-docker

Up-to-date Samba Docker image optimized for NAS file sharing with full macOS Spotlight support via Elasticsearch integration.

⁠Configuration & Usage

See deploy-example for an example docker-compose.yml and smb.conf setup. Docker Compose is recommended for deployment. Note that you'll need to mount a number of files/directories into the container, in addition to the Samba shares themselves:

      - /etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro
      - /etc/shadow:/etc/shadow:ro
      - /etc/group:/etc/group:ro
      - ./10-tz.sh:/etc/cont-init.d/10-tz.sh:ro  # set timezone
      - ./70-smbusers.sh:/etc/cont-init.d/70-smbusers.sh:ro  # set up SMB users
      - ./smb.conf:/usr/local/samba/etc/smb.conf:ro  # your smb.conf
      - /var/log/samba-docker:/usr/local/samba/var/log  # optional: Samba logs

The recommended usage is to remove Samba from the host and allow this container to bind directly to port 445 using host networking.

⁠Using testparm

With your docker-compose.yml set up, you can use testparm⁠ as follows to check your smb.conf:

docker compose run samba testparm /usr/local/samba/etc/smb.conf

⁠IO and Nice Prioritization

Samba is arguably the most important thing running on my NAS; when I'm browsing files/folders on it, I want it to be as fast as possible. To help achieve this I've added the following to the samba service in my docker-compose file:

    command:
      - ionice
      - -c1
      - -n1
      - nice
      - -n-17
      - /usr/local/samba/sbin/smbd
      - --foreground
      - --no-process-group
      - --configfile
      - /usr/local/samba/etc/smb.conf
    cap_add:
      - CAP_SYS_NICE

This runs smbd in the "realtime" IO class, with priority 1 (the possible priorities are 0-7, with lower numbers being higher priority). To give it priority on the CPU, I also give smbd a nice value of -17 (values range down to -19, the highest priority).

⁠Migrating away from system Samba

This is necessary if you want the Samba container to use host networking and listen on port 445 (recommended).

apt remove smbclient samba samba-common && apt autoremove

⁠See Also

• smb.conf reference⁠
• smbd reference⁠
• smbpasswd reference⁠
• https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Build_Samba_from_Source⁠
• https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_fruit.8.html⁠
• https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configure_Samba_to_Work_Better_with_Mac_OS_X⁠
• https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configuring_Logging_on_a_Samba_Server⁠

⁠Elasticsearch & FSCrawler (for Spotlight support)

To enable macOS Spotlight support, you'll need to set up an Elasticsearch instance and FSCrawler to index your Samba shares. See the deploy-example/elasticsearch directory for an example docker-compose.yml and configuration files, and deploy-example/fscrawler for an example FSCrawler setup.

Note that:

• Recent versions of Elasticsearch are not compatible with Samba. I have had luck using Elasticsearch 8.8.2 specifically.
• Samba does not support authenticating to Elasticsearch via Basic Auth or API Key. You'll need to allow anonymous users to query your fscrawler indexes, and use e.g. Tailscale to lock down access to your Elasticsearch instance.
• To make things easier, I have disabled HTTPS for my Elasticsearch instance. This is fine for me since it's only accessible over Tailscale; I recommend you do something similar. Otherwise you'll need to set up Samba to trust your Elasticsearch TLS certificate somehow (this might be easy if you let Tailscale handle certificate issuance; otherwise 🤷‍♂️).

The example stack in deploy-example handles all of this (except the Tailscale bits). For additional guidance and troubleshooting, see my blog post on the topic⁠. (LINK TK)

⁠See Also

• https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Spotlight_with_Elasticsearch_Backend⁠
• https://fscrawler.readthedocs.io/en/latest⁠

⁠Compatibility

• https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15511⁠
• https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15342⁠
• https://github.com/Ellerhold/fs2es-indexer/issues/27#issuecomment-1676052344⁠
• https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2023-August/246274.html⁠

⁠Monitoring with Netdata

TK

⁠See Also

• https://www.netdata.cloud/monitoring-101/samba-monitoring/⁠

⁠License

Original works in this repo are licensed under GPL3; see LICENSE⁠ in this repo.

⁠Author

Chris Dzombak⁠ (github.com/cdzombak⁠)