Stop deadnaming me, Samba!

Oct 18, 2019

A brief follow-up to Stop deadnaming me, Linux!

One thing I do is run a Linux VM on my MacOS laptop. I generally want these to be isolated, but to have a single folder available to share between them. To do this I previously created a samba share in the VM which I mount as necessary in MacOS. Changing my username broke this, but it was easy to fix. The VM I’m using is running Fedora 30, samba is from the fedora repository; if you’re on a different distribution or using a different package you may have a slightly different experience – these are really just notes-to-self, but I hope you’re able to benefit from them if you stumbled upon this.

Fix samba users

1. Create a new samba user. As root, run smbpasswd -a [name] to create a new samba user for your username. This should match your system username, but when prompted to set a password you can use any password you like.
2. Banish your deadname samba user. As root, run smbpasswd -x [deadname]. You should see a response like this:

Failed to find a Unix account for deadname Deleted user deadname

Update the samba share configuration

Edit your samba share configuration; for me, this was located in /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[shared]
        comment = Shared with Host
        browsable=yes
        path=/home/deadname/Shared
        public=no
        valid users=deadname
        write list=deadname
        writeable=yes
        create mask=0770
        Force create mode=0770
        force group=deadname

Using your favorite text editor or sed¹, replace deadname with name and restart samba (systemctl restart smb as root).

You’re done!