Samba is the standard Windows interoperability suite of programs for Linux and Unix. People can browse a server directory like use Windows OS on their own computer. It also could avoid the scp step if you want to download and open a text file in the server, yes, you could open any files on the server and edit it like on your own computer.

Here I will introduce the steps to set up Samba on CentOS in a home network. There may be a problem if someone wants to use this Samba function on Windows 10 systems with a server that support different version of the Samba protocol. My laptop OS is Fedora, and the server OS is CentOS.

1. Install Samba on local computer and server, eg: yum install samba samba-client samba-client-libs.
2. Start the protocol on server, sudo systemctl start smb.service.
   • The smbd service provides file sharing and printing services and listens on TCP ports 139 and 445. At here, for personal reason, I didn’t want to start the nmbd server, which provides NetBIOS over IP naming services to clients and listens on UDP port 137.
3. Set up firewall

   firewall-cmd --list-services
   firewall-cmd --list-ports
   firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=samba
   

4. I want to use the /home/yulijia directory via Samba, so the Samba configuration file (/etc/samba/smb.conf) could be:

   [homes]
    comment = Home Directories
    valid users = %S, %D%w%S
    browseable = Yes
    read only = No
    create mask = 0700
        directory mask = 0700
    inherit acls = Yes
   

   Once done, please restart Samba services, systemctl restart smb.service

5. Connect from your local machine. Because I use Fedora, so I could open the Nautilus to add a new connect to server link (smb://192.168.0.111:139/), then connect to the server, select Registered User, enter your server username and password.

Then the files on the Samba server will be shown.

Note: the default port of Samba service is 139.

Reference:

[1] How to Install and Configure Samba on CentOS 7