Hello, I am trying to setup samba with share security and have the contents public/read-only but have a user that can map to this share from a windows box with full read/write privledges? I have a user named "media" which is in the group "media". The user media was also added via smbpasswd -a with the same password. I try to map a drive from windows xp with the credentials but get access denied. The directory I am sharing (/mnt/sda1/test) was chmod 775 with media as the owner and group. Here is my smb.conf file.

[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
netbios name = AREA51
security = share
encrypt passwords = true

[test]
comment = AREA51 File Server
path = /mnt/sda1/test
write list = @media
public = yes
read only = yes
force directory mode = 0775
force create mode = 0775

I am pretty new to samba so please be detailed in your response. Thanks :-)

I use the following rather than security=share

[Global]
security = user

[shared]
comment = Shared network data
path = /shared
inherit acls = Yes
read only = No

It means you have to set up a user on the linux box and then still do the smbpasswd stuff, but once you've done that you set the ACLs using linux for whatever you want the users to see/amend etc. rather than editing the smb.conf.