Fixing read-only access to SMB shares on iOS 18+

In iOS files app, you can connect to a SMB server over LAN and use it for storage (read and write). After an upgrade to iOS 18, it looks like Apple changed something where default settings for my samba server on Linux no longer allowed write access to the share from iOS – the share was always showing up only as read-only.

The fix is to add the following to the [global] section of /etc/samba/smb.conf:

vfs objects = streams_xattr

After this, run sudo systemctl restart smb and now you should have read/write access to the share from iOS devices.

5 Replies to “Fixing read-only access to SMB shares on iOS 18+”

  1. This is amazing, every other device except my iPad can write to my SMB share. Never buying Apple again, getting it to work with other stuff is a nightmare. Would be interesting to hear how you discovered this.

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