Before restarting the service, test your changes with "testparm". It will catch mistakes. I only showed the public share I had set up and not the rest of my smb.conf file.

You need to restart the smbd service but you don't need to reboot to do it. If you use swat, you can do it from the web interface.

For SuSE you would use "sudo /usr/sbin/rcsmb restart" and maybe "sudo /usr/sbin/rcsmbfs restart". For some others you would use "service samba restart" or directly like "sudo /etc/init.d/smbd restart". You may want to restart the nmbd service & the winbind service as well if they are running. It only takes a few seconds.

Sorry, maybe I should be calling them daemons. Plus smbd is technically a server and not a service.

Many of the distros also supply three samba 3 books with either the main samba package or a samba-doc package. Also, you might look into using samba swat. It is a web based interface you can use to set up shares. You could always set up additional shares, trying different options and experiment. It will go a lot easier with experience.

Sorry I couldnt post back before you had to restart, but running:

should restart the service.

Yeah, what ^^ said.