Rumba is a stripped-down fork of a very old version of Samba, for retro computing purposes.

Recent versions of Samba have removed support for the older SMBv1 protocol used in the Windows 3.x and 9x days. This is absolutely the right move for the project to have made (Microsoft have been dropping support for it too); however, it does mean that there's no longer an easy way to share files with vintage Windows machines. Since SMBv1 is Win9x's native file sharing protocol, it's useful to have an alternative that does support these old versions.

This is heavily stripped back and intentionally does not include all of Samba's features. The goal is to make something simple and easy to set up that hopefully requires minimal maintenance. In particular the following are not supported:

• SMBv2, SMBv3 or the CIFS extensions (only SMBv1 is supported)
• Authentication/password-restricted shares (all shares are public)
• Per-user home directory shares
• Printer sharing
• NIS, automount, and any of Samba's more obscure bells and whistles you may have used in the past.

This is based on a very old version of Samba, and there may be bugs or security issues hiding in here that have since been fixed in mainline Samba. This is purely for fun and personal use by hobbyists and retro enthusiasts. You should not use this for anything serious or mission critical. You have been warned.

Tested with

• Windows 3.11, 95, 98, ME
• Windows NT 3.51, 4
• Windows 2000, XP
• OS/2 Warp 4.52
• Workgroup Add-on For DOS / MS Client 3.0
• Samba (smbclient still works as of Samba v4.21)

Check out some screenshots.

Rumba has been compiled/run successfully on:

• Debian GNU/Linux
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD

It has also been built on OpenBSD, Haiku and Tribblix (Illumos / OpenSolaris), but support is currently incomplete; Rumba uses extended filesystem attributes to preserve DOS file attributes, and system-specific code to support these systems has not yet been written.

FAQ

• Why is there no support for password protected shares? The old SMBv1 protocol is very insecure, especially earlier versions. The cryptography is essentially obsolete. I made a deliberate decision not to give the illusion of security that passwords would imply. Other methods such as firewalls can be used to restrict access to shares if desired, though if something is being shared that's important enough to need password protection, you should be using a different protocol.

• Why remove all the features of Samba? Partly to make it a smaller and simpler codebase, partly to intentionally deter any use of the project for serious use. There are undoubtedly people out there who want to continue using SMBv1 for Serious and Important Purposes and I do not want to either encourage this or support a full fork of Samba and its many, many features. Rumba aims to do one thing and do it well, which is to allow hobbyists to share files with vintage machines.

• What about security vulnerabilities? This is a very valid concern; Rumba is based on a very old (and immature) version of the Samba codebase. I've gone through historical security reports from the era and patched any vulnerabilities that were later discovered. The fact that most superfluous features have been removed helps a lot to reduce the attack surface; many of the historical vulnerabilities do not apply simply because the vulnerable code was deleted. I've taken multiple additional steps to mitigate any undiscovered vulnerabilities: the server always runs as an unprivileged user; it is compiled with fortification enabled; the included systemd configuration file applies heavy sandboxing; and by default all connections from public IP addresses are blocked.

Configuration

• How do I configure this? Is there an equivalent to smb.conf? Since there are very few configuration options, there is no configuration file. Instead, it is configured like a traditional Unix daemon, with command line arguments.

• Okay, how do I create a share? A list of directories to share is given on the command line. The included systemd service file automatically shares all directories found in /var/rumba, so you just need to create a subdirectory there and restart the server.

• I can't find the server, what's wrong? You also need to run a NetBIOS name server (nmbd). Rumba doesn't have one of its own yet, but you can use the Samba one. Install the Samba suite and then disable its SMB server, eg. sudo systemctl disable --now smbd and the server should appear (it will be mistakenly labeled as a Samba server in the server description).

• My share is read-only, how do I make it read/write? You can do this using the chmod command, eg. chmod o+w /var/rumba/myshare

• Why can't I connect from a public IP address? Since there is no support for password authentication, Rumba by default only allows connections either from localhost (127.0.0.1) or from IPs in RFC 1918 private ranges. You can specify the -a command line argument to open connections from all public IP addresses, but you should understand the implications of doing this and consider if it is really what you want.