Samba Help

[trlists at clayst.com]

I hoep there are some Samba gurus out there.

I am trying to set up a file server for an in-house windows network, 
using Samba.  The Windows machines are Win98 or Win2K, and there are 
only a few of them.  The server is behind a firewall and access from 
the net will not be allowed -- the ports are blocked.

I want a few public shares (e.g. tmp, pub) and I also want a share for 
each user that can be used for private data.  A "user" is pretty close 
to equivalent to a physical Windows system.  Being able to access a 
person's data from a different physical system would be a very minor 
plus but is not at all essential.

I have to say I've gotten quite lost in the various flavors of possible 
samba configurations.  At the moment I have share-level security, and 
the public shares work, but that required enabling guest access.  The 
private ones do not.  Here are some of the questions I've run into:

- Should I be using user- or share-level security for this 
configuration?

- When a Windows machine connects where does it get the username and 
password passed to the server?

- Is samba going to condition access rights on machine name, user name, 
or some combination?  Or are they the same?

- Do I need a separate Linux user name for every Windows user?  Or 
should I be mapping them all to the same Unix user?  Do I need a samba 
user for each as well?

- Should I be using encrypted passwords?

- What should the owner and group be for the private directories?  For 
the public ones?

- Is it possible to give access to the public diorectories without 
using "guest ok"?  Or is setting guest access the best method?

Thanks ...

 ----------
 Tom Rawson