I'm going to be building a NAS server soon for home use using Centos 5.1 and samba and have got some questions.

I've used samba before at work but only basic functions on it so i no only a small bit about it. what I'm after is for when i hit the IP in something like XP (\\192.168.0.xx) it comes up with all the shares that are available. At the moment it keeps asking for the user name/password before i can see anything and don't really need any of that as its only gonna be "public" over the home network. I've been playing around with it on a VM at work but not getting as far as i hoped. I've installed both samba and swat to play around with. a private section would be nice but i would prefer to have a public section first before the private

does anyone have any ideas about how i can go about it.

thanks

Well, if you really want to open your set-up up to this point, i.e. with no security, then you do something like this:
in the [global] section
Of course, there is certainly something a bit more complicated that does the job, depending on how many different users are actually logged in your LAN.
An again, this is really insecure, so I'm ducking right now and waiting for the security-conscious people to throw sharp things at me.