os/linux/ HomeLinux

At home, there is just me on my LAN. I prefer my Linux boxes to be very insecure and permissive for the sake of convenience. There is nothing on them that is sensitive like financial details, rather they are music players, media servers, toys to tinker with, things to develop small software on. Just as I don't want to keep my screwdrivers locked in a safe, I don't want to be entering passwords all the time, or wrestling with permissions. With that in mind, and the caveat that you should never do things like this if security is important:

1. echo ALL ALL = NOPASSWD: ALL | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/wideopen — so you don't need a password for sudo
2. sudo sed -i -e "/xml:lang/d" -e "/<allow/s/auth_admin.*</yes</" /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.UDisks2.policy — See UbuntuLinux under Polkit.

I tend to make things available via samba, and possibly read-write. My Thinkpads, some of which run Windows, use a samba mount as their Chrome downloads folder, so that downloads are shared and, more importantly, if the Thinkpad has a small (i.e. <= 256GB) SSD, then I don't want downloads accumulating on that SSD.

Samba shares

In /etc/samba/smb.conf, e.g.

[books]
  path = /media/john/t420b_hdd1/books
  available = yes
  valid users = john
  force user = john
  read only = no
  browsable = yes
  public = yes
  writable = yes

is my ebook collection on a Thinkpad named t420b (which has a broken screen so largely functions as a quiet server, though via a dock).