Accessing Samba Share in Vista

[RottweilerCP]

I am running Vista Ultimate x64. I have a VM with CentOS 5. I have Samba setup very basically with the following smb.conf:

[global]
workgroup=WORKGROUP
server string=ROTT-VM-1
security=user
log file=/var/log/samba.%m
max log size=50

[homes]
guest ok=yes
read only=no

[Share]
path=/home/rottweiler/share
public=yes
writable=yes

Connecting from Vista, I see the computer name, but am asked for a password when connecting. If I add

map to guest = bad user

then I can connect without using a password. However, I get the following error if I try to access the Share or homes folder

\\ROTT-VM-1\homes is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource.

What do I need to do to be able to access this samba share from Vista without giving a username and password?

I have already tried setting the LAN Manager authentication level to

Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated

and restarting.
I have also tried giving the group and other write privilege on the share folder. Currently the permission on the folder is drwxr-xr-x.

The LAN Manager authentication level seems to be the answer everywhere I look online, but it doesn't seem to change anything for me.

Thank you for any help.

[RottweilerCP]

OK, I have found a partial solution. I installed another VM, this time Ubuntu. I set up samba the same way and it still did not work. After checking the default smb.conf I found that security=user is not what I want. So now I have removed security=user and added map to guest=bad user and everything works in Ubuntu. I did the same thing in CentOS and it did not work. Again, I can see the shared folders, but cannot open them.

My smb.conf now looks like this:

[global]
workgroup=WORKGROUP
server string=ROTT-VM-1
;security=user
log file=/var/log/samba.%m
max log size=50
map to guest=bad user

[homes]
guest ok=yes
read only=no

[Share]
path=/home/rottweiler/share
public=yes
writable=yes

I checked the versions using smbstatus and on CentOS I have samba version 3.0.28-1.e15_2.1
On Ubuntu I have 3.0.28a.

I also checked using yum info samba and apt-cache showpkg samba and see the same version for CentOS, but for Ubuntu it says 3.0.28a-1ubuntu4.4.

It looks like this is a specific ubuntu version, so I would not expect that I could get it in CentOS. I think I'll ask on the CentOS forums and see if anyone responds.

If anyone here has an idea to the differences between these versions of samba or if it's a CentOS vs. Ubuntu issue, please let me know.

[RottweilerCP]

For anyone interested, the answer was in smbpasswd and smbusers. Or, more likely, with the security of the guest account. I do not think the guest account was being allowed access, probably to the home folder. I added my user using 'smbpasswd -a rottweiler' and I could log in and browse from my other linux install. Then, since my windows username was different, I mapped my windows username to the linux username in smbusers and added a reference to smbusers in the smb.conf (user map=/etc/samba/smbusers).

My final smb.conf is:

[global]
workgroup=WORKGROUP
server string=ROTT-VM-1
log file=/var/log/samba.%m
max log size=50
username map=/etc/samba/smbusers

[homes]
guest ok=yes
read only=no

[Share]
path=/home/rottweiler/share
browseable=yes
public=yes
writable=yes

My smbusers file is:

# Unix_name = SMB_name1 SMB_name2 ...
root = administrator admin
nobody = guest pcguest smbguest
rottweiler = "Windows Username"

Make sure to use quotes if your windows username has a space.

I still don't know why this works without this in Ubuntu and not CentOS, maybe the guest account is set up differently. I will look into that some other time, for now it works for me.

Figuring this out on my own was a good lesson, but I hope this can help someone else.