How can I access a samba share in a workgroup without requiring credentials?

Question

Samba is working mostly great for me. I am prompted for credentials the first time I access the share from my windows machines. I assume my creds are being cached somewhere as I am not prompted repeatedly on subsequent accesses. However, I would like to completely open up access to this particular share (it's all on a private and secured LAN). The server the samba share is on is streaming media to multiple client machines and I want those client machines to have write access to the samba share through whatever program it is running. These machines are part of a workgroup (not on a domain).

Solution 1

When you connect to the Samba box from a Windows client Windows will try and authenticate with the cached credentials used to login to Windows. If Samba isn't configured with a matching username and password in it's database (local tdbsam, Active Directory, LDAP etc) then it considers this a bad login, hence prompting you for good credentials.

You can map all bad login attempts to a guest account using: map to guest = Bad User

And configuring a guest account (make sure this has unix permissions for the share) with: guest account = nobody (nobody being the default)

And you may need guest ok = yes in the share definition too.

All of this will have the effect of making connections to the box appear to automatically login.

Solution 2

Probably something like this in the share definition of smb.conf:

[public]
  comment = Public Folder
  path = /home/public
  public = yes
  writable = yes
  create mask = 0777
  directory mask = 0777
  force user = nobody
  force group = nogroup

Though there are many ways to do it.

Comments

[Peter Kahn]

FYI, I found this to work regardless of security type once I added "public = yes" to my share definitions