How to make Samba share to NOT ASK FOR PASSWORD

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OK, I have found an answer myself.

As this is absolutely not obvious from the docs and HOWTOs and whatever, the reason this thing asks for password is because it cannot map guest user to the owner of the directory being shared.

I have NTFS partitions which I need to mount RW so I used the following setup in my /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdb1  /media/disk1  ntfs defaults,noexec,noatime,relatime,utf8,uid=1000,gid=1000 0       2
/dev/sdb2  /media/disk2  ntfs defaults,noexec,noatime,relatime,utf8,uid=1000,gid=1000 0       2

The most important pieces of config are uid and gid (maybe only uid, don’t know).
They are set to the UID and GID of the user jonnie set up on the server (obviously not root). So, when ntfs-3g will mount these disks, everything will be owned by him.

After that, I have added this user to the Samba registry (or maybe created new identical one, don’t care):

# smbpasswd -a jonnie

It asked for password, I have entered the same as for the main system.

After that, I have added the force user and force group settings to the smb.conf:

[global]
  workgroup = WORKGROUP
  netbios name = HOMESERV
  security = share

[disk1]
  comment = Disk 1 on 400GB HDD
  path = /media/disk1
  browsable = yes
  guest ok = yes
  read only = no
  create mask = 666
  directory mask = 777
  force user = jonnie
  force group = jonnie

[disk2]
  comment = Disk 2 on 400GB HDD
  path = /media/disk2
  browsable = yes
  guest ok = yes
  read only = no
  create mask = 666
  directory mask = 777
  force user = jonnie
  force group = jonnie

So, most important piece of config relevant to me was force user.

Courtesy of the Samba HOWTO

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