I've found that mounting shares from client computers is the last 20% of the process, but can be 80% of the work. After creating a share on your DIY RAID 5 NAS with Ubuntu, go to a client PC on your network and try to log in. You'll find that the log-in won't work. This is because every NAS has a trick to allowing clients to mount shares. This sick torture, inflicted while we wannabe geeks are at the finish line, is the price we pay for using open source products.

The trick to making your RAID 5 NAS share mountable on other computers is the /etc/samba folder. One great resource for getting little things going on your Ubuntu installation is Ubuntu dapper. The SAMBA tricks are located in the Samba Server section.

What you need to do is open a terminal window on the NAS and then type cd /etc/samba and then type ls to verify that you can see smb.conf. Next, type sudo nano smb.conf and the computer will ask you for your password (you set this up during your Ubuntu install, remember?). Type it in and hit <Enter>. Then type <Ctrl>+W to search for a text string and type in security = user

The lines in smb.conf will look like this:

# in this server for every user accessing the server. See
# /usr/share/doc/samba-doc/htmldocs/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/ServerType.html
# in the samba-doc package for details.
; security = user

take out the ; at the beginning of the security = user line and then change user to share so that the line looks like this:

security = share

Then, scroll down to the very bottom of your smb.conf file where you should find the following:

[test]
path = /home/bill
available = yes
browseable = yes
public = yes
writable = yes

Note that the last part of the path name, i.e. /bill, will probably be different. Now add these lines:

create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
force user = nobody
force group = nogroup

The final product will look like this:

[test]
path = /home/bill
available = yes
browseable = yes
public = yes
writable = yes
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
force user = nobody
force group = nogroup

Type <Ctrl>+X to exit the Nano editor, then hit Y to save the changes. Finally restart SAMBA by typing:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

To log on to my RAID 5 NAS I needed to authenticate with no username and no password. This is not a very secure Linux SAMBA configuration by any means, but it will get you started.