Recommended image for serving files on LAN

LSIO Discussion Container Requests
1

I need a way to serve files on the LAN.

I have been using https://github.com/dperson/samba for a couple of years.

Now that my server broke and I am moving to a Raspberry Pi, all my LSIO images are still working great but there is no Arm version of that Samba image I’ve been using.

Please share some suggestions on how you accomplish this.

2

https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/samba-file-server/ first hit on Google.
And you posted this in Container Requests btw.

3

Thanks @gilbn. If there is no LSIO image for serving files, then this is a container request.

I could follow the instructions from the first link I find on Goolge, but we could all do that for installing all of the other services we are running with LSIO images. But we don’t, because running a docker image that is well supported by an active community is what we all prefer.

There are also several rpi-friendly Samba images on the internet which hasn’t been updated for 3 years.

If others are installing Samba directly on the host OS, is there a reason for that? Docker disk io performance? I used to get 85 MB/s over gigabit ethernet on the old PC I used to use, so I’d be surprised if that is an issue for people.

4

Sorry, didn’t see the link you posted was a container. Still early here in Europe :slight_smile:

5

No worries, my apologies if my reply came across snarky.

6

Unfortunately there’s no plans for us to create a samba image. In the year’s of us running this project, we’ve had a handful of requests for it and that’s it.

We had discussed this as a team I believe a while ago and we feel that even though you can put anything in a container, doesn’t mean it should be put in a container. I have personally felt that protocols like that should be installed on host as they tie in with othe functions of the OS (users for example)

Looking at the container you linked above, it has docker files for armhf so it’ll be fine on the raspberry pi.

7

@j0nnymoe thanks for the detailed explanation. I can accept that.

Just for the record, I like to pass in the users and keep it in a config file like this:

  samba:
    image: dperson/samba
    container_name: samba
    command: -u "blomerus;${ADMIN_PASSWORD}" -s "media;/share;yes;no;no;blomerus" -s "public;/public;yes;no;yes"
    volumes:
      - ${DATA_DIR}:/share
      - ${DATA_DIR}/public:/public
    environment:
      - TZ=Africa/Johannesburg
      - WORKGROUP=blomerus
      - USERID=1000
      - GROUPID=1000
    ports:
      - 139:139
      - 445:445
    restart: unless-stopped

This is much more portable from server to server than having to create users on each server, and it is under version control so I only had to know how to set it up at one point in time.

Maybe I just needed the correct tag to get the image to start on the Pi. Or maybe my error was unrelated to being on a different platform. I will give it another try.

1 Like