Dolphin and public read/write folder - Samba share

[dgvirtual]

I have often wondered, why sharing a folder in Dolphin and marking it as accessible for writing to anyone does not result in it being accessible to anyone.

I mean the procedure when you right-click on a folder in Dolphin, Choose "Properties", then choose "Sharing", tick "Allow Guests" and then choose in the dropdown Everyone "Full access".

I have finally figured out how to make the access to guests really work.

Besides doing the changes specified above, you ALSO have to change the folder permissions to allow full access to "Others" (that is, to everyone).

It is, I think, an oversight on side of Dolphin developers to not do that automatically (perhaps with notification for the user) when a user enables full samba access to a folder.

[oshunluvr]

Dolphin is not specifically a Kubuntu program so some of the constraints and how things must be done are due to how Ubuntu has decided to control access by default.

Some examples of differences;

• Ubuntu uses "sudo" but does not enable a root password by default. Many distros do the opposite.
• Ubuntu assigns each user their own primary group by default. Many distros have a common group assigned as users' primary group, like "users".

It's the unique primary group that runs afoul of sharing a folder with Dolphin, thus forcing you to make the Public folder truly public - open to "Others". Frankly, a folder owned by a group with only one member is a poor way to share that folder in my view.

My solution is to create a special system group for file sharing I call "shared". Then I can create folders and assign them the shared group and add any or all users to that group as well. Rather than opening the "Public" folder in each users' home to "Others" or even switching it to the "shared" group, instead I mount a special shared folder to each user's "Public" folder (in my case it's on a server). Then the "public" folder is truly public but the users' home remains secure and the shared folder belongs to the "shared" group.

Also, if you're in the habit of backing up your /home partition or folder, it's a simple matter to create the shared folder under /home thus including it with your backups.

[dgvirtual]

An interesting thing is, I cannot make the guest shares work on my laptop. And only on my main account. On my spare account the shares work fine with guest access, but not on the main account (I have to enter credentials to access the main account shares). The only difference between the accounts that I can think of is, that the main account share is on an encrypted (ecryptfs) home folder...

[oshunluvr]

I can't help you with encryption questions - I don't use it. A web search will probably reveal the answer.