imartyn/samba4k8s repository overview

⁠helm-samba4

⁠Helm Chart and Dockerfile for Samba4 based on alpine:latest.

This Chart is fully-featured and enables some neat features :

• Shares persistentVolumes, hostPaths, flexVolumes and arbritrary volumes that might not even have k8s drivers yet via samba/cifs
• Creates users based on values provided or doesn't
• Works with it's own automated build docker image or with the #1 hit for samba on dockerhub (even though that has no autobuild, has only ever been built once and only has a :latest tag. You've been warned!)

⁠Users

The chart will provision you smb users automatically based on the samba.users values. This is the recommended way of dealing with users using this chart. example values.yaml settings for the samba.users block :

samba:
  users:
  - username: myuser
    password: hunter2
  - username: myotheruser
    password: CorrectBatteryHorseStaple

Setting these values via a secrets management system is recommended.

⁠Storage

Most of this chart's cleverness is around the volume selection. If you set persistence.enabled to true, it then looks at the value of persistence.type and acts accordingly. The data volume is mounted in the container under /data.

⁠privatePersistence

This image optionally uses a second mount for samba's "private" storage (/var/lib/samba and /etc/passwd) so users can be persisted between pod restarts. If you wish to manage your users manually and allow them to change their own passwords for instance you may set privatePersistence.enabled to true

If you don't specify any other privatePersistence options, the chart does it's best to do something appropriate. If you want to set options, it's exactly the same as the above persistent storage.

These are the rules it uses -

• if you use hostPath for your main storage, the privatePersistence is mounted as .smbprivate/ underneath it.
• if you use persistence.type.pvc without setting privatepersistence.pvc.size, it uses a default of 20Mi for private data
• if you use persistence.pvc.existingClaim and not privatePersistence.pvc.existingClaim, the chart will attempt to use defaults for the pvc that it creates.
• if you use flexVolume or other for the persistence type and don't set a privatePersistence block of the same type, the chart will simply fail

⁠smb.conf

The container's smb.conf is loaded in via a configmap and is templated for some basic settings (single share).

Much like the samba.users config above, you can create samba.global.extraLines and samba.share.extraLines and add extra entries for the lines you wish to add. For example your values.yaml may contain something like this (don't use that setting btw unless you know exactly what you're doing!):

samba:
  global:
    workgroup: HOMEGROUP
    extraLines:
    - key: fake oplocks
      value: yes
    - key: fstype
      value: Samba 
  share:
    nameOverride: bigdisk
    extraLines:
    - key: force user
      value: martyn
    - key: valid users
      value: martyn

⁠Other configuration

⁠Why?

Because why not? The use cases are actually multiple:

• Home/LAB setup with windows clients
• Kubernetes actually allows you to use volumes of type cifs, this might be a useful way of sharing a PVC in an environment where you have no ReadWriteMany cloudprovider
• A lot of backup applications have SMB as a target, having SMB storage in your cluster so you only ever have to back up your PVCs is quite nice.