I have a Linux Mint laptop with a few samba shares. I'm sharing a directory from the home folder, and another from a USB HD that I mounted to the home folder. After messing around a ton for the past two days, I got everything working fine both ways. Everything works and everyone has full read/write permissions from my phone and my Windows machine using non-password protected guest access.

However, I cannot get my Debian laptop to create any directory or folder, or have any write permissions at all. As far as I know, I didn't think I had to configure anything on the client end to have proper permissions? What am I doing wrong?

Well, how are you communicating the shares from the Debian machine to the Mint machine, NFS, CIFS? I have to say we're missing a bit of information here. Normally you can't write to network shares. So, yes, you'll have to configure write access. There are a number of ways to do that, but I need more info first.

How are you mounting the shares currently?