Ladies and Gentlemen,

I was hoping someone here could guide me in the right direction regarding the problem I am facing. I have literally tried all possible options in the internet forums with no luck.

I am trying to connect to a samba share running on a headless server running Fedora Server. I am trying to connect to it from Mac mini for Time Machine backup and getting the below error in the log:

> 
> make\_connection\_snum: canonicalize\_connect\_path failed for service
>  timemachine, path /home/timemachineuser/timemachinebackup
> 
> 
> 

The Fedora Server is running as VM on Proxmox hypervisor. And I have allocated 750GB of storage via Proxmox for the sole purpose of using it for Time Machine backup.

Below is my setup in `/etc/samba/smb.conf`

```
[timemachine]
    comment = Time Machine
    create mask = 0770
    directory mask = 0770
    path = /home/timemachineuser/timemachinebackup
    read only = No
    spotlight = Yes
    vfs objects = catia fruit streams_xattr
    fruit:time machine = yes
    fruit:aapl = yes

```

The path in the `smb.conf` is a mount point from the storage that I allocated in Proxmox.

```
/dev/sdc1    738G   73M  700G   1% /home/timemachineuser/timemachinebackup

```

If I change the path in smb.conf to any normal folder in `/home/timemachineuser` folder and then try to connect from Mac, it works absolutely fine. But when the path is a mount point, I get the above error. I have given execute permissions to entire hierarchy as suggested by many using `chmod -R a+x /home`. But no luck.

I have tried formatting `/dev/sdc1` with XFS and ext4 file formats with the same results.

Appreciate any kind of help to get this sorted. Thanks in advance.

**File Permissions of the hierarchy:**

~ ⌚ 21:05:09
$ ls -ld / /home /home/timemachineuser /home/timemachineuser/timemachinebackup

dr-xr-xr-x. 22 root root 4096 Jan 9 23:26 /
drwxr-xr-x. 4 root root 67 Jan 6 08:11 /home
drwxrwx--x. 5 timemachineuser timemachineuser 221 Jan 11 18:11 /home/timemachineuser
drwxrwxrwx. 3 timemachineuser timemachine 4096 Jan 11 17:45 /home/timemachineuser/timemachinebackup

~ ⌚ 21:05:12
$
['https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/562745', 'https://unix.stackexchange.com', 'https://unix.stackexchange.com/users/240469/']
I was working on something similar the other night. My setup is a little different in that I do not use a home directory, each LVM is mounted at its own root level directory but a few things that may help:

In the [Global] section, i enforce a minimum SMB level using:

```
[Global]
min protocol = SMB2

```

If you are running SMB 4 you could also set SMB3 as a minimum if you're end point client supports it (a couple of mine don't yet hence locking to v2 as a minimum).

Have you run smbpasswd to set the smb authentication for the connecting user?

As I mentioned earlier mine use root level dirs rather than home level (avoids ambiguity with selinux in regards to options for what i would call a normal samba shares and a home dir based share.

For these I use the follow to set up relevant selinux securities:

```
setsebool -P samba_export_all_ro=1 samba_export_all_rw=1
getsebool –a | grep samba_export   ##Just to check it set properly
semanage fcontext –at samba_share_t "/timemachine1(/.*)?"
restorecon /timemachine1

```

I also chown on the timemachine directory so the owner is the user I am logging on to for the samba share.

Also double check your firewall ports are open:

```
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=samba
firewall-cmd --reload

```

From the mac if you open finder and do command-K you do a manual samba connection to test.

Beyond that there could be something odd in the Global section of your smb.conf, might want to post that section if you are still stuck.
Have you tried telling SELinux on the server that the directory may be accessed by Samba?

It might be as simple as telling SELinux that sharing of home directories is allowed:
setsebool -P samba\_enable\_home\_dirs 1