After hours of searching, I discovered that the share name and the share directory cannot be the same (and it's not case-sensitive, either). See this post on serverfault.

So, if I change my share name in smb.conf from:

[Music]

to

[Tunes]

I can both read and write to the share. No other changes to my smb.conf were necessary, and no need to chmod 0777.

Ok, figured it out. It wasn't in my samba settings. The error was actually in how I was "permanently" mounting my samba share.

I was doing:

//192.168.1.11/craig /home/craig/musicServer cifs username=craig,password=MYPASSWORD 0 0

but I needed

//192.168.1.11/craig /home/craig/musicServer cifs username=craig,password=MYPASSWORD,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0 

Adding both file_mode and dir_mode solved it.

for what it is worth, I couldn't access my samba share, maybe you have forgotten to add you username to the samba password group (for lack of beter description phrase)

this is what I did to get mine to work

smbpasswd -a username

after by using nautilus, shared my drive/folder with right-click, sharing, etc.

create your password, and use your username and passsword (which you just entered) to access your samba drive, you can also map this drive in Windows

hope this could help

From your comment:

I forgot to mention that the drive in /media/USBHDD/shares is formatted in NTFS, to be readable on windows. That makes it unable to be changed using chown and chmod, which are both solutions that I've already tried.

I guess you're using ntfs-3g. In this case you should research the following mount options of it: uid,gid,dmask,fmask. First thing you should do is passing uid=MYUSERNAME to whatever mechanism mounts the drive. This will make the filesystem appear as if everything in it belonged to MYUSERNAME.

If you were mounting via fstab, the proper line would look similar to the one in this question (but read my answer there). The path /media/… suggests the drive might be mounted by some sort of automounter; if so, then you should configure its options.

Some parts of my original answer (below) apply to filesystems that support UNIX permissions. With NTFS, instead of chown you should just pass proper uid and gid while mounting.

Original answer:

Your share and objects under it are owned by root and only the owner has write permissions. I'm talking about UNIX permissions in ls -l output, this itself has nothing to do with Samba.

Then Samba forces any valid user (valid users = backups MYUSERNAME root; these are Samba users, not necessarily UNIX users) to be MYUSERNAME (force user = MYUSERNAME) in context of UNIX permissions. This user has no write access.

Possible solutions:

• let MYUSERNAME own everything in the share:

  sudo chown -R MYUSERNAME: /media/USBHDD/share
  

• give every user write access to everything in the share:

  sudo chmod -R +w /media/USBHDD/share
  

• a combination of above, with reduced scope maybe; or a solution that uses group access; now you know what the issue is, so ask yourself what permissions to what asset you want to give to whom.

• force user = root (if possible), but this would be stupid.

Some of these solutions will work better with different create mask and directory mask in Samba configuration. Research and understand their meaning.

You're missing:

force directory mode = 0777

Also, you really want to use 0666 for force create mask. Probably no good reason to force the execute bits.

Looks like you created a folder miguel in the media and you have taken ownership of it. Instead, let's create a group, add users to that group, and set the permissions.

sudo groupadd -g 10000 [samba_group]
sudo adduser migeul [samba_group]
sudo chown root:[samba_group] -R /media/migeul
sudo chgrp [samba_group] /media/migeul
sudo chmod 775 -R /media/migeul

This will create a group and attach it to the folder to be shared. You add the users to that group for access. Set the permissions to 775 which gives the owner and the group read-write-execute access while others only read. Set's it recursively.

Verify that you have total access to the folder. With samba, setting the permissions are a little bit different than file permissions with a ubuntu user. What I mean is that verify the permissions after you take ownership because they could result in a samba error later on down the road. Where nobody can access the drive.

Create a samba account that matches your Linux username precisely.

sudo smbpasswd -a miguel
sudo smbpasswd -e migeul

That will prompt you to create a password for the username miguel. Please note that this is only for SMB shares not for the user in the Operating System.

Afterward, open up the samba config and when sharing the drive make sure you type in writable = yes, browsable = yes, read only = no and add your group to it as well. Also, verify the location you are sharing from. Use the place that it is mounted to.

[migeul]
comment = Migeuls folder
​path = /media/migeul
​browsable = yes
​writable = yes
​guest ok = no
​read only = no
​valid users = @[samba_group]

After you reconfig the /etc/samba/smb.conf file, reload it.

sudo smbd reload

These pages go more in-depth with setting up samba shares.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Samba/SambaServerGuide https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-set-up-samba-shares-for-groups/

You may also need to set your umask as well. To do that open up /etc/profile using sudo nano /etc/profile and at the bottom type in umask 002. Use Control+O to save and Control+X to exit. Best to reboot the server using sudo reboot and the new mask permissions will take place. That setting re-asserts the same permissions for the users.

When it fails for everyone but root (mounted) it looks like:

drwxr-xr-x 1 root root     0 Jun 17  2014 .

But works when it is unmounted and looks like:

drwxrwxrwx 2 root users 4096 Jun 17 16:17 .

You have a simple permissions problem. Clearly the first one only root has the write permission. On the second, it has full permissions.

When you mount a device, it uses the permissions as set on that device. Mount the device, then change the permissions.

I recommend to create a dedicated user for that share and specify it in force user(see docs).

Create a user (shareuser for example) and set the owner of everything in the share folder to that user:

adduser --system shareuser
chown -R shareuser /path/to/share

Then add force user and permission mask settings in smb.conf:

[myshare]
path = /path/to/share
writeable = yes
browseable = yes
public = yes
create mask = 0644
directory mask = 0755
force user = shareuser

Note that guest ok is a synonym for public.

It looks like you have the mount permissions as read/write for root but only read for anyone else. I think you would need to set the permissions on /media/HDD to be writeable for the walter user or the users group.

sudo chown -R root:users /media/HDD will set the group permissions to users (I presume this exists?) or sudo chown -R walter:users /media/HDD will make it owned by walter.