Why samba ask for a password

I tried to mount a drive from windows XP and I tried and tried and finally got it to work. my issue is the following, samba will ask you for some authentication, however it will still ask you even if Windows dont. This makes that you cant mount a drive unless you provide a (fake) password.

This is kind of confusing since you propously set it as 0 authentication so people can access it freely.

If this was a Fat32 usb drive, it will be annoying to put a password on it. however why is this ok when mounting a windows share?

Could you post your smb.conf

One thing you could look at, are you both part of the same workgroup?

have you set in the global section security = share

e.g.

[global]
security = share

If it is set to security = user it will ask for a password to authenticate.

My smb.conf is here. I dont see much of the point since I think smb.conf is for the samba server.

My setup is getting from a linux machine into a Windows share. AFAIK smb.conf is mainly for the linux machine setup.

In other words the shared folder is ont he windows PC.

This windows pc doesnt require any password but when I wanted to mount it from linux it did ask me for a password.

My fstab looks like this:

//estudio/Documentos\040c /mnt/Winbugs smbfs user,credentials=/etc/samba/auth.estudio.proprietario 0 0

Sorry about that, I thought you were trying to mount a samba share onto a windoze machine. Your actually trying to mount a windoze share on a linux machine, so the smb.conf is not required.

Have you added root user to samba, since you are running samba you still need to add a root user:

smbpasswd -a root

Originally Posted by Jzarecta //estudio/Documentos\040c /mnt/Winbugs smbfs user,credentials=/etc/samba/auth.estudio.proprietario 0 0

what is in /etc/samba/auth.estudio.proprietario ?

Originally Posted by fotoguy Have you added root user to samba, since you are running samba you still need to add a root user: smbpasswd -a root

Hi I am not a networking guy so I havent used all the options of samba. Can you please explain me a bit on why I will want to do this in the future and how will it change the way I interact with windoze on a network.

I only use samba on my home network so I haven't had a lot of experience with it. But you need the samba daemon to mount the windoze shares on the linux machine. Samba needs to run as root to have permission to mount shares on to be able to write to the unix file system. So you need to add root as a samba user, and the same goes for any other users you have on the system that you want to have access through samba.

In your case it may not make any difference but I thought it maybe something to try just in case samba is having trouble accessing the fle system to mount the share. It may be trying to mount it as root but there is no samba root user.