I want to do a thing which seems to be far more complicated than I thought, probably because I am far more clumsy than I hoped.

I just want to set up things so that every user of every one of the 4 WinXP systems in my little LAN gets able, WITHOUT having to enter any usernames or passwords, to access a read/write Samba shared folder on a Fedora Core 6 computer which I want to use as a file server.

I tried in many ways to achieve this result, but I have not succeded yet. No matter what I do on the Fedora smb.conf file (passwords disabled, guest ok = yes, security = user, security = share and so on), WinXP keeps on asking for user and password everytime I try to access. The only way I managed to get access to the folder was adding a user to the smbpasswd file (smbpasswd -a user...) and login with THAT user from any WinXP system.

Which is pretty different from what man pages say about smb.conf:

"Sections may be designated guest services, in which case no password is required to access them."

What am I missing?

Thank you

When you set up the share in the conf file, make sure you put guest in the valid users = line, below is something similar to a share I have set up. I don't have a wide open share, but the first things I would check is that you have guest access turned on, and that guest is in the valid users line.

[data]
comment = Data
path=/foo/bar/smbexport
browseable = yes
writable = yes
valid users = my important users