Enabling Samba Shares Across Subnets, Part 1

“In this series we’ll set up a Samba server that serves two
subnets, which is is a common scenario even on home networks: one
wired and one wireless. Then we’ll hook up a third subnet just to
show how it’s done. Once you know how to do that you can easily
expand to as many subnets as you want. In Part 1, we’ll start out
with a simple anonymous file and printer server.

“If you’re wondering why not just bridge your wired and wireless
subnets, you can, and this works well for small networks. But
Ethernet bridging does not scale very well because it generates a
lot of broadcast traffic, and as you add more subnets it becomes
pointless–if you’re going to bridge them you might as well have
one big address space instead of dividing it. Routing is more
efficient, and you have more control over what goes where. So you
can have it all–a nice efficient routed network, and a central
Samba server available to all your network segments. (You can also
share printers across subnets with CUPS, and make them available to
Windows clients with CUPS + Samba.)”

Complete
Story