Apologies if this has already been discussed. I spent some time looking through this and other forums and didn't find that anyone had already done this, so came up with a solution to share.
Merlin's branch of ASUSWRT lets you customize to your heart's desire, but the stock firmware limits Samba (file sharing) to keep it easy for the non-techie to understand. With the stock GUI, you can either allow everyone complete and anonymous access, or require a username and password for every connection.
For music and video storage I prefer a middle-ground use case: allow anonymous read-only access for anyone on my local network, while restricting write/delete access to a logged-in account. There's no way to get there through the RT-AC87 or RT-AC66 stock GUI (I presume this is true for other ASUSWRT implementations, but those are the only two models I have in hand).
My solution was to build a custom smb.conf file, store it in persistent storage, and make use of the nvram script_usbmount parameter to automatically set Samba up to my preferences anytime the router reboots.
Take a look at the blog post and Git repo below for a thorough description of how this is done, and for the scripts to automate it.
Blog: http://dnlongen.blogspot.com/2014/12/customizing-samba-on-asuswrt-wireless.html
Git: https://github.com/dnlongen/ASUSWRT_Samba_Fixer
Merlin's branch of ASUSWRT lets you customize to your heart's desire, but the stock firmware limits Samba (file sharing) to keep it easy for the non-techie to understand. With the stock GUI, you can either allow everyone complete and anonymous access, or require a username and password for every connection.
For music and video storage I prefer a middle-ground use case: allow anonymous read-only access for anyone on my local network, while restricting write/delete access to a logged-in account. There's no way to get there through the RT-AC87 or RT-AC66 stock GUI (I presume this is true for other ASUSWRT implementations, but those are the only two models I have in hand).
My solution was to build a custom smb.conf file, store it in persistent storage, and make use of the nvram script_usbmount parameter to automatically set Samba up to my preferences anytime the router reboots.
Take a look at the blog post and Git repo below for a thorough description of how this is done, and for the scripts to automate it.
Blog: http://dnlongen.blogspot.com/2014/12/customizing-samba-on-asuswrt-wireless.html
Git: https://github.com/dnlongen/ASUSWRT_Samba_Fixer
