When setting up my samba configuration I read several different "tutorials" on the internet all slightly different and I did never know which to trust (they all had smaller mistakes afaict). Basically the problem is that one has to have a good understanding of which options are available (and important to set) and which values to set them. This made me thinking about a setup wizard that guides the user through the most important steps and then creates a config based on the selections made. Short example of one question throughout the setup: "Do you want users in the network to be able to access the share without authentification [y/n] (default: n)" (Wording can probably be further improved). Not only will this likely help with saving time for casual users, it will also help preventing flawed configs.
this is not something that we as the Samba team will take care of. Something like what you ask for is being implemented by vendors like some Linux distributions or one of the NAS appliances based on Samba.
Can you please elaborate why "this is not something that [you] do"? I don't really understand why not. I just had a short look and found some GUI tools, I think that are available on certain distributions. This is however not what I ask for. I am rather asking a command line utility, maybe similar to what rclone does (if you are familiar with that). I also think it is crucial to have this bundled together with the main application, so it is available to everyone and usage of best practices is ensured. To further stress the possible importance of such a tool, I will link some guides or documentation for setting up the config that are available on the internet: - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-set-up-quick-and-easy-file-sharing-with-samba/ - https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/install-and-configure-samba/13948 - https://www.pks.mpg.de/~mueller/docs/suse10.1/suselinux-manual_en/manual/sec.samba.serv.inst.html - http://www.firewall.cx/linux-knowledgebase-tutorials/system-and-network-services/848-linux-services-samba.html - https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-and-configure-samba-on-ubuntu-18-04/ - https://vitux.com/how-to-install-and-configure-samba-on-ubuntu/ - https://www.dummies.com/programming/networking/network-administration-samba-smb-conf-file/ - https://www.thomas-krenn.com/de/wiki/Einfache_Samba_Freigabe_unter_Debian (German) - https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Samba_Server/smb.conf/ (German) - https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/smb.conf.5.html (And yes, I know one could say that a user is expected to properly inform themselve, but that takes a lot of time and in reality most casual users will probably just copy some guide's configuration.)