Another stroke of genius that we can do with Nextcloud is the possibility of presenting external storage and mounting it to give access to our users directly. GOOD, What do we mean by external storage?? Well, for example, What we'll do in this post, which will be to connect some shared folders of a Windows file server,

Let's think about what a company's file server is, and we want some users to be able to work with certain folders remotely. Well, thanks to the fact that users access Nextcloud with their Active Directory accounts, we can mount this external storage and they will only access the files and folders that have permissions 🙂 But hey,, that we can also mount this type of storage:

• OpenStack Object Storage
• Amazon S3
• FTP
• Local
• Nextcloud
• SFTP
• SMB / CIFS
• WebDAV

Start! First we must install some requirements on our Nextcloud machine:

[SourceCode]apt-get install smbclient php-smb php-smbclient[/SourceCode]

We edit the Samba configuration file '/etc/samba/smb.conf’ indicating the protocols we allow:

[SourceCode][global]
client min protocol = SMB2
client max protocol = SMB3[/SourceCode]

Once the environment has been prepared, it will be as simple as from the Nextcloud administration website to access the “Configuration” > “External storage” and create the resources that interest us. We will be able to authenticate directly from here with an account to mount the storage directly, or select to pass through the user's account with the warehouse to be assembled (This is usually my favorite), we indicate the Server that shares, The name of the share, domain and optionally the users who will see the mount point & Confirm!

If we log in as a user, We will see directly in the files panel and the folders with an external storage icon, if we click on one of them…

Well, we will be able to see how we remotely access our organization's file server! We have our data at our fingertips, wherever we go we can have access to them to work on them! A marvel!