Samba private and public shares for windows

Solution 1:

I think you may be hit by an annoying long standing issue that is solved in Windows 8: you can't login to the same server both anonymously and password protected, even if it's a different share. Some weeks ago, I was struggling with this too. On Windows 8, the public share was readily available, but on Windows 7, I could not get permission.

What I did is use the valid users directive for the private shares, like you did. Then I also said public = no to the public share, and just make sure everybody's user is present in the samba user database (pdbedit -L). This is a lot easier when this samba server is also a domain controller, BTW.

I then also set force user and force group so that files won't be owned by whoever makes it. However, there are other ways of doing this. You could also fiddle with ACL's and retain the original ownership info. However, the force group and user options are far easier :)

BTW, public and guest ok are synonymous.