Opening the Firewall Ports and Configuring SELinux for a Samba Server on GNU/Linux

By default, client machine will not be able to connect to a Samba server running on GNU/Linux, for two reasons:

  • The GNU/Linux firewall will block incoming connections to the Samba server by default.
  • SELinux will block client access to the Samba shares by default.

To work around this, you must configure the GNU/Linux firewall to accept incoming connections through the ports commonly used by Samba. You must also configure SELinux to allow client machines to access the Samba shares.