Samba public share

Samba is overly complex. The number of configuration options makes it very configurable and therefore cool but some of those options are just completely crazy.

One such example is the creation of publicly available folder - something that I have no doubt is very popular when you create a NAS server at home and you just want to have one network share to exchange files between computers. Doing that using Microsoft Windows is quite simple: you just specify that everyone shall have read/write permissions and that is it. With Samba on Linux the case is not quite so easy. Here's an example configuration that achieves just that:

[public]
  path = /storage-location-of-public-drive
  guest ok = yes
  read only = no
  public = yes
  browseable = yes
  writeable = yes
  create mask = 0666
  force create mode = 0666
  security mask = 0666
  force security mode = 0666
  directory mask = 0777
  force directory mode = 0777
  directory security mask = 0777
  force directory security mode = 0777

I dare someone to logically explain why the hell one needs 4 entries to set the same thing (create, force create, security create and then finally force security create) and then defend that as a sane thing to do.

Anyways... Creating public Samba share demystified