Public Samba Server
In some situations, it is valuable to have unauthenticated access to a Samba server, where the username and password supplied by the client is ignored.
To share (for example) /data on a Samba server first create an smb.conf with:
[globals] map to guest = bad user
[share] path = /data guest ok = yes
To allow write access to the share change it to:
[share] path = /data guest ok = yes read only = no
Finally, ensure that the Samba guest account (typcially nobody) has the posix permissions to read and write (as appropriate) /data on your server's file system.
For example, you may wish to give world read access with:
chmod -R a+rX /data
To change the guest account, set:
[globals] guest account = samba_guest map to guest = bad user
This configuration will still permit authentication - any user in your Samba password database (passdb.tdb, smbpasswd etc) can still authenticate, as long as the username is correct.
To test access to the share will work regardless of username specified by the client, run:
smbclient //server/share -Unot_a_user%foo smb> ls smb> get file
(where file is a file in /data)