Installing and Configuring the Windows Network Drive App — ownCloud 9.1 Server Administration Manual 9.1 documentation

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# Installing and Configuring the Windows Network Drive App

The Windows Network Drive app creates a control panel on your Admin page for seamless mounting of SMB/CIFS file shares on ownCloud servers.

Any Windows file share, and Samba servers on Linux and other Unix-type operating systems use the SMB/CIFS file-sharing protocol. The files and directories on the SMB/CIFS server will be visible on your Files page just like your other ownCloud files and folders. They are labeled with a little four-pane Windows-style icon, and the left pane of your Files page includes a Windows Network Drive filter. Figure 1 shows a new Windows Network Drive share marked with red warnings. These indicate that ownCloud cannot connect to the share because it requires the user to login, it is not available, or there is an error in the configuration.

Figure 1: Windows Network Drive share on your Files page.

Files are synchronized bi-directionally, and you can create, upload, and delete files and folders. ownCloud server admins can create Windows Network Drive mounts, and optionally allow users to create their own personal Windows Network Drive mounts.

Depending on the authentication method, passwords for each mount are encrypted and stored in the ownCloud database, using a long random secret key stored in `config.php`, which allows ownCloud to access the shares when the users who own the mounts are not logged in. Or, passwords are not stored and available only for the current session, which adds security.

## Installation

Enable the Windows Network Drive app on your ownCloud Apps page. Then there are a few dependencies to install.

You must install `php-smbclient`. This should be included in most Linux distributions. See eduardok/libsmbclient-php if your distribution does not include it; this provides source archives and instructions for installing binary packages.

You also need the Samba client installed on your Linux system. This is included in all Linux distributions; on Debian, Ubuntu, and other Debian derivatives this is `smbclient`. On SUSE, Red Hat, CentOS, and other Red Hat derivatives it is `samba-client`. You also need `which` and `stdbuf`, which should be included in most Linux distributions.

## Creating a New Share

When you create a new WND share you need the login credentials for the share, the server address, the share name, and the folder you want to connect to.

1. First enter the ownCloud mountpoint for your new WND share. This must not be an existing folder.
2. Then select your authentication method; See Enterprise-Only Authentication Options for complete information on the five available authentication methods.

Figure 2: WND mountpoint and authorization credentials.

3. Enter the address of the server that contains the WND share.
4. The Windows share name.
5. The root folder of the share. This is the folder name, or the `$user` variable for user’s home directories. Note that the LDAP `Internal Username Attribute` must be set to the `samaccountname` for either the share or the root to work, and the user’s home directory needs to match the `samaccountname`. (See User Authentication with LDAP.)
6. Login credentials.
7. Select users or groups with access to the share. The default is all users.
8. Click the gear icon for additional mount options. Note that encryption is enabled by default, while sharing is not. Sharing is not available for all authorization methods; see Enterprise-Only Authentication Options.

Figure 3: WND server, credentials, and additional mount options.

Your changes are saved automatically.

Note

When you create a new mountpoint using Login credentials you must log out of ownCloud, and then log back in so you can access the share. You only have to do this the first time.

## Personal WND Mounts

Users create their own personal WND mounts on their Personal pages. These are created the same way as Admin-created shares. Users have four options for login credentials:

- Username and password
- Log-in credentials, save in session
- Log-in credentials, save in database
- Global credentials

## libsmclient Issues

If your Linux distribution ships with `libsmbclient 3.x`, which is included in the Samba client, you may need to set up the HOME variable in Apache to prevent a segmentation fault. If you have `libsmbclient 4.1.6` and higher it doesn’t seem to be an issue, so you won’t have to change your HOME variable.

To set up the HOME variable on Ubuntu, modify the `/etc/apache2/envvars` file:

    unset HOME
    export HOME=/var/www

In Red Hat/CentOS, modify the `/etc/sysconfig/httpd` file and add the following line to set the HOME variable in Apache:

    export HOME=/usr/share/httpd

By default CentOS has activated SELinux, and the `httpd` process can not make outgoing network connections. This will cause problems with the `curl`, `ldap` and `samba` libraries. You’ll need to get around this in order to make this work. First check the status:

    getsebool -a | grep httpd
    httpd_can_network_connect --> off

Then enable support for network connections:

    setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

In openSUSE, modify the `/usr/sbin/start_apache2` file:

    export HOME=/var/lib/apache2

Restart Apache, open your ownCloud Admin page and start creating SMB/CIFS mounts.

# Windows Network Drive Listener

The SMB protocol supports registering for notifications of file changes on remote Windows SMB storage servers. Notifications are more efficient than polling for changes, as polling requires scanning the whole SMB storage. ownCloud supports SMB notifications with an `occ` command, `occ wnd:listen`.

Note

The notifier only works with remote storages on Windows servers. It does not work reliably with Linux servers due to technical limitations.

Your `smbclient` versions needs to be 4.x, as older versions do not support notifications.

The ownCloud server needs to know about changes of files on integrated storages so that the changed files will be synced to the ownCloud server, and to desktop sync clients. Files changed through the ownCloud Web interface or sync clients are automatically updated in the ownCloud filecache, but this is not possible when files are changed directly on remote SMB storage mounts.

To create a new SMB notification, start a listener on your ownCloud server with `occ wnd:listen`. The listener marks changed files, and a background job updates the file metadata.

## Setup Notifications for an SMB Share

If you don’t already have an SMB share, you must create one. Then start the listener with this command, like this example for Ubuntu Linux:

    sudo -u www-data php occ wnd:listen <host> <share> <username> [password]

The `host` is your remote SMB server, which must be exactly the same as the server name in your WND configuration on your ownCloud Admin page. `share` is the share name, and `username` and `password` are the login credentials for the share. By default there is no output. Enable verbosity to see the notifications:

    $ sudo -u www-data php occ wnd:listen -v server share useraccount
    Please enter the password to access the share:
    File removed : Capirotes/New Text Document.txt
    File modified : Capirotes
    File added : Capirotes/New Text Document.txt
    File modified : Capirotes
    File renamed : old name : Capirotes/New Text Document.txt
    File renamed : new name : Capirotes/New Document.txt

Enable increased verbosity to see debugging messages, including which storages are updated and timing:

    $ sudo -u www-data php occ wnd:listen -vvv server share useraccount
    Please enter the password to access the share:
    notification received in 1471450242
    File removed : Capirotes/New Document.txt
    found 1 related storages from mount id 1
    updated storage wnd::admin@server/share// from mount id 1 -> removed internal path : Capirotes/New Document.txt
    found 1 related storages from mount id 3
    updated storage wnd::administrador@server/share// from mount id 3 -> removed internal path : Capirotes/New Document.txt
    found 1 related storages from mount id 2

See Using the occ Command for detailed help with `occ`.

## One Listener for Many Shares

As the ownCloud server admin you can setup an SMB share for all of your users with a `$user` template variable in the root path. By using a ServiceUser you can listen to the common share path. The ServiceUser is any user with access to the share. You might create a special read-only user account to use in this case.

Example:

Share `/home` contains folders for every user, e.g. `/home/alice` and `/home/bob`. So the admin configures the Windows Network Drive external storage with these values:

- Folder name: home
- Storage Type: Windows Network Drive
- Authentication: Log-in credentials, save in database
- Configuration `host: "172.18.16.220", share: "home", remote subfolder: "$user", domain: ""`

Then starts the `wnd:listen` thread:

    sudo -u www-data occ wnd:listen 172.18.16.220 home ServiceUser Password

Changes made by Bob or Alice made directly on the storage are now detected by the ownCloud server.

## Running the WND Listener as a Service

See Configuring wnd:listen to run as a service in the documentation wiki for tips on running the listenera as a service via cron, and by creating a Systemd startup script.

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