Samba Share Success

I've been struggling to set up a Samba share on my work machine that provides a public folder to both Windows and Linux clients for quite some time now. See, we have a Squeezebox set up in the developer workspace. It's a great system, facilitating countless battles between those of disparate musical taste. Naturally, I've wanted in on the action since I started—but until now, I've been largely denied.

The set up requires that people host their own music in a shared folder, and place a Windows shortcut to their share in a folder on the machine that is running the SlimServer software. Sounds simple enough, right? I'd assume so, too, but the plethora of Samba tutorials provide conflicting and only partially working solutions.

The problem I kept encountering is this: in order for the shortcut to work, Windows can't be required to provide a password to access the share. However, the vast majority of tutorials suggest that setting

security = share

is the correct way to achieve this. Unfortunately, this causes windows to misbehave: "The account is not authorized to log in from this station," and other such nonsense.

Fortunately, I found this configuration, which had some components that all the others missed. Here are key steps that had been absent in other configurations:

• Follow a standard user security method:
  security = user
• Make sure that Samba has a 'nobody' account set up with no password:
  # smbpasswd -an nobody
• Add the following to the [global] section:
  map to guest = bad user

Finally, I can contribute to the musical cacophony!