OK - Let me give a run down of how the SMB server needs to work and you guys can let me know what you think is best or how I should set this up.

I have a file server (RHEL 4.4) that needs to dish out our daily builds to all our developers running Windows XP Pro. Naturally Samba is installed and running fine. There are 2 users on the box besides admin/root. The 2 users have local shell accounts so they don't have any problems accessing the Samba share.

I forgot to mention that I set Samba to authenticate against our Windows DC/AD server. This way if you're logged in to the domain at your own PC and try to map the Samba share, it does not prompt you for any username / password. The problem I have now is I will have 100+ users who will need to read + execute this share path (not write) and I don't want to have to manually create a single user account for each and everyone of the them. That would take way too long and I would have no idea who or how many right now need access.

What would you do? Basically users need to browse this share and download daily builds to their local machines and nothing more.

Thanks for any help!

then you should be able to group them on the PDC and map them to UNIX groups on your samba server using "net groupmap" ie:

net groupmap add ntgroup=devusers unixgroup=developers

(replace devusers and developers with your own groups)

If you then set ownership of the folder to developers(or whatever) they'll have access to the share and the UNIX perms will dictate access. You can also use the following to control access via smb.conf:

write list = +\DOMAIN\user +\DOMAIN\group +user

to give the person writing the builds write access to the share and:

read list = +\DOMAIN\user +\DOMAIN\group +user

where + must preceed user and group names that are part of the domain as opposed to local users are are addressed without the +.
Before Samba 3.0.23b (from memory) you used @Group but since then you have to explicitly name the domain in each entry.

You can also set POSIX acls that allow you to expand permissions to more than just a single user, group and others.
Too much to put here but basically go look up net groupmap in the samba docs as well as posix acls.

Hope this helped.

Cheers,

Jools