Simple Samba Share - NO PASSWORD

Yes, Samba can be a pain. I use it for my home as well as work.

The first thing you should do is start over from scratch to make troubleshooting easier. You can do this by running the command below in the terminal.

dpkg-reconfigure samba-common

Then go to the folder on the samba server that you want to share, and make sure that the user nobody can read and write to the share. This is because the user nobody is the username windows clients use. I usually just make a folder in the / directory just to keep things simple, but the "correct" way would be to make a subfolder of /srv. If you have not modified the permissions already, use the commands below.

sudo chown -R nobody.nogroup the_folder
sudo chmod -R 777 the_folder

You can also test to see if nobody can write to the directory by running the following command as root.

sudo -u nobody touch test_file

Edit your /etc/samba/smb.conf and add the lines below the [printers] share definition.

[share_name]              ;the share name can be what ever you want
browseable = yes
path = the_complete_path_to_the_shared_folder
guest ok = yes
read only = no
create mask = 777

Then when you are done save it and run the following.

testparm

This will will warn you if you made any typos. Next, you just need to restart the samba services.

sudo systemctl restart smbd
sudo systemctl restart nmbd