it used to be like when i setup a samba share, windows would ask for a password when i try to access it through network neighborhood (no matter what windows account i was using it would ask for a username and password) i want it to be setup like that again instead of having a windows profile that matches the username and password in the smbpasswd file

i am asking for windows to ask for username and password when i try to access a share in network neighborhood instead of having the same windows profile that matches the samba profile

ps: i am using webmin to manage samba graphically, the newest version of webmin

thanks

Sounds like you may need to make sure simple file sharing is turned off. Open a Windows Explorer window, click on Tools menu then Folder Options, go to View tab, scroll all the way down in Advanced settings section and uncheck "Use simple file sharing".

you can't configure anything on the unix computer to do this its all on the windows computer?

It's Windows that is trying to use the credentials you are logged into Windows with to access the share. That's what simple file sharing does, it assumes you have the same users on all your computers, or that your on a common domain or workgroup etc... If you turn off simple file sharing Windows will prompt authentication to connect to the share, that is as long as your samba share is password protected, you can make your samba share unprotected, in which case Windows would just connect to it with no authentication. You can do this with the security option in smb.conf, set to user it will require authentication, set to share it will allow everyone, gotta have the right perms on the folder too.

what about something different

how do i get windows to ask for a login on startup and not let anyone in until you enter a username and password for the samba server without putting an account on windows that resembles the samba one (i don't want to add accounts to alot of computers every time someone gets a new account for the network)

Try these steps

first create a user on your linux box,

# useradd username
# passwd username

then add the user to samba

# smbpassword -a username

then edit your smb.conf file

# vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

Check the security setting, should be on or around line 101, set to user to prompt for login to the share. Then add your share info to the bottom of the file, should look something like this

[sharename]
comment = sharename
path = /pathtoshare
browseable = yes
writable = yes

Make sure the user you created has rw access to the shared folder, and that's it, then go back to your Windows side and you will get prompted for user/pass when you try to map to the share, and you will of course use the user/pass you setup on the Linux side.

What I was saying before though is that Windows Simple File Sharing suppresses the prompt, you may still need to turn that off on any computer you want to connect to the share from, or you need to hard map the share to a drive letter and use the different user/password option.