In this tutorial, we cover the basic use of Shares. We show how to add, modify and remove Shares from your Amahi 7 server.

Amahi establishes several Shares for you to use as defaults. Default Shares included Books, Docs, Movies, and so forth.

To access the Shares setup area from your Amahi Dashboard, click Setup, then Shares.

Here, you will see all the shares that are pre-configured in your server.

If you click on any share row, say, on Books, you will see the details about it and will be able to manage its properties. Share properties include Access, Visibility, Permissions and Location.

Also note the Delete icon in the upper right corner. More on that later.

First, Access.

With a check in the All Users block, this share will be accessible to anyone that has access to the server. If this checkbox is not checked, more options become available to allow you to limit access to only authorized Amahi Users and/or to guests. You further have the option to make the share accessible but not writeable by anyone.

It is also possible to tailor Permissions to provide more granular control of a share

Here, with All Users not selected, you are able to provide Access control and Writeable control on an individual basis. Also included is Permissions for a Guest account.

Lets say we want our primary user, but not Guests, to have access. In this case, Access should be checked for those users you wish to have access and unchecked for those you don't. If you want the user to also have write permission for this share, Writeable should also be selected. The option to provide individual write access to a share is especially useful when you want to, for example, store your entire family picture archive on you server for everyone to see. You can prevent deletion of files by anyone other than those you specifically designate.

The permissions icon is to clear all permissions on the files in the shares. This may be needed if some apps put files there and the permissions do not allow modification or removal. This operation needs confirmation, because it cannot be reverted.

Next, Visibility.

This option is available if you want to make the share unlisted. Users with the right permissions can still access the files, but the share is never listed to those browsing the server.

Location

This is an advanced configuration and should generally be left to the default setting. This is the file path, in Linux, of this particular share. Here are some examples of when you would want to change it: one would be to point two shares to one disk with the same data but different share permissions, another example would be if the path to the data changes, such as when adding or replacing a drive. Clicking on the file location allows you to edit the path of the share.

Finally, you can delete this share using the “Delete Share” option in the upper right-hand corner. However, even though the share is deleted from Amahi, the folder and files in that folder are not. This is not a proper way to delete the files associated with a share. It’s always best to delete all files from a share (or move them somewhere else) before deleting the share itself.

Now that you know the control that Amahi provides for your Shares, lets make a new Share and delete it.

In the bottom center of the Shares tab is a button for New Share. Now, enter a Name for your share. Amahi will verify that that name is available and will automatically assign and verify that the Path is available.

Now, select if the share is visible or not and then whether it ought to be Read Only (not writeable) by default. Once you have made your selections, click Create. Click Cancel at any time to back out.

If you decided to go ahead with it, you should see your new share, which in our example is called “abc”

Well, let's say that this share needs to be deleted now. Click on Delete abc. Amahi will ask, just to make sure.

Click OK and that's it...you've successfully deleted the share.


Now let’s look at how to access the files from Windows.

To access the data in the Docs shares, open a file browser, not a web browser, and enter \\hda\docs and the data in the shares will show up. You can then access files, create new folders in it, and so forth.

And that's about it. There are more options available with advanced settings enabled, but we will look at those in another screencast.