UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

So what i am trying to accomplish is the following:
a share that is browse-able by every one on the network with a group of people that can write to it with out ownership problems. I am extremely new to samba/linux and any help would be greatly appreciated. It is a stand alone server running samba 3.6.

Who is allowed to access what files is still limited by ordinary Linux file permissions, so that has to be set up carefully. Your users must login to Samba as users allowed to access the right files, and Samba must create their files with permissions which allow them to be used later.

A globally anonymous "everyone else" user is tricky. If you have any control over windows account names, I'd make the anonymous ones all "student" or something (and renaming a Windows account after it's created does NOT actually change the username!) and give more proper logins, names without capital letters or spaces, to people who authenticate with a real username and password.

Getting permissions right means deciding what Linux filesystem permissions you want the files to end up with and configuring Samba to enforce that. If you want one group of users to have read-write access and another to have read-only access, you want the files to be created with rw-rw-r-- permissions and to all belong to a group you create, perhaps share or the like.

You also want the directories to be rwxrwsr-x and belong to the share group, so that files created in it belong to the group.

As a start, perhaps append something like this to your smb.conf :

Code:

[Share]
path=/path/to/fileshare
create mask = 664
# Set sticky bit on new folders people create
directory mask = 2775
writeable = yes

Then add a user by these shell commands:

Code:

# Add user as a UNIX user.
useradd username
# do NOT give them a UNIX password.
# give them a Samba password.
smbpasswd -a username

The password you give Samba must match their Windows login password. Then restart Samba and see if they can browse to \\servername\share, and see what permissions any files and folders they create become with ls -l in Linux.

I'm researching how to do the anonymous/guest user without password.

Post the smb.conf you already have so we can tell what else needs to be changed.

Code:

[global]
        server string = Samba Server Version %v
        interfaces = lo, eth0, em1, 192.168.1.2/32
        security = SHARE
        password server = None
        log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
        max log size = 50
        load printers = No
        printcap name = /etc/printcap
        local master = No
        domain master = No
        dns proxy = No
        idmap config * : backend = tdb
        guest ok = Yes
        hosts allow = ALL
        cups options = raw


[public]
        comment = Public Data
        path = /home/public
        read only = No
        guest only = Yes
        volume = Public-Data
[sandbox]
path = /home/sandbox
comment = Sandbox
volume = sandbox
browseable = yes
guest ok = yes
read only = yes
writeable = no
follow symlinks = yes
wide links = no
write list = @dcsadmin
force group = dcsadmin

I think you want 'security=user', not 'security=share'.