117-202 · Question #217
Which of the following Samba configuration parameters is functionally identical to the parameter read only=yes?
The correct answer is C. writeable=no. See the full explanation below for the reasoning.
Question
Options
- Abrowseable=no
- Bread write=no
- Cwriteable=no
- Dwrite only=no
- Ewrite access=no
How the community answered
(26 responses)- A4% (1)
- C81% (21)
- D12% (3)
- E4% (1)
Community Discussion
6
Marit C.Jun 6, 2026The answer is C, writeable=no. Samba treats "writeable" and its alternate spelling "writable" as direct aliases for the inverse of "read only", so when you set writeable=no in smb.conf you are telling the daemon the exact same thing as read only=yes, and the parameter parser will resolve both to the same internal flag. Option B looks tempting at a glance but "read write" is not a recognized smb.conf parameter name, so it would either be silently ignored or throw a warning depending on your Samba version. Option D, "write only=no", is not a real Samba parameter either, and a quick testparm run will confirm neither B nor D produce the behavior you expect. Knowing these alias relationships matters for the exam because the Samba documentation and man page for smb.conf explicitly list the synonyms, and questions like this are testing whether you have read that section or just guessed at the grammar.
Samuel O.Jun 7, 2026Good catch on the aliases, and worth adding that testparm is your best friend here because it normalizes all the synonyms in its output, so you can actually see "read only = Yes" reflected back regardless of which spelling you used in smb.conf.
Nina C.Jun 9, 2026So I went with C, writeable=no, because I remembered that "writeable" and "read only" are basically inverse aliases of each other in Samba, so flipping writeable to no gets you to the same place as read only=yes. Can someone clarify whether Samba actually recognizes "read write" (option B) as a valid parameter at all, or is that just a distractor that sounds plausible but does not exist in smb.conf?
Samuel O.Jun 9, 2026"read write" is not a valid smb.conf parameter, it is a distractor, the real options are "read only" and "writeable" (or "writable" with one e), so B is just there to trip up anyone going off memory instead of the actual man page.
Dervla O.Jun 3, 2026I flagged B first because "read write=no" looks like a direct negation of read-write access, but when I read the stem a second time the word "functionally identical" pushed me to think about synonyms in the config file itself, and "writeable=no" is literally the inverse alias that Samba maps one-to-one with "read only=yes" in smb.conf.
Samuel O.Jun 12, 2026Tripped on this one too, but writeable=no is literally just the alias smb.conf uses internally.