First, I must say that I hate Samba. Or maybe this hatred goes towards the book I have for configuring it since nothing even remotely close to the book's description ever presents itself. Either way, there is much hatred going towards something.

I have Samba running. I only wanted to run it as a client for Microsoft File & Print sharing, not as a server. However, that doesn't seem possible. So Samba is running as a fascist server and requests a password when I try to look at my Linux machine within the Network Neighborhood of my Windows machine. When I attempt to view the Windows machine from Linux it shows up but won't connect. (Even more annoying is the lack of any sort of GUI interface in KDE for Fedora to view my local network. I have to switch to Gnome to do this).

All I want to do is share the printer on my Windows machine with my Linux machine. I don't want any passwords or logins to do this. This is what a LAN is all about... not having to login each time I want to look at something that's shared (defeats the whole purpose of sharing).
I hate saying it but networking 15 Windows machines would be faster and easier than networking a single Linux machine to a Windows machine.

I wont get into the reasons for the way samba is, but I will say this: any file or printer sharing must be done from a server after all it is "serving" files and printers.i.e. even windows 98 has a server in a way.

access to samba without a password is done with several lines put in the smb.conf file:

security=user
guest account=<a valid linux username>




On each share in the smb.conf put:

guest ok=yes
guest only=yes

Thats it, the 'guest account=<a valid linux username> must have rights on each shared folder, i think you can use the root user as guest but a default option in the smb.conf normally stops this (can't remember exactly what it is), just change this option from ya to nah or vice versa. the option 'guest ok=yes' in each file and printer share section is the actual option that allows access without a password.

Exactly in that way. When you enable "file and print sharing for Microsoft networks" it actually enables the "server" service (that's exactly what it's called). In a workgroup (no domain controller) Windows defaults to share level permissions, whereas Samba defaults to user level permissions, however.

Webmin works quite well for me and can be run remotely; you can share Linux dirs using IE from a Windows box, for example. LinNeighborhood is pretty good too and works with KDE; I use it often to mount Windows shares on my Linux machine. Both came with my copy of Mandrake and make using Samba a breeze.

Any chance I might be able to find something like this for Fedora? It's exactly what I'm looking for!