On Thu, 2012-03-15 at 02:49 -0700, Steven Hess wrote:
To me it is a problem. NFS works without password. I don't want passwords. I am not sharing this stuff on the Internet but on private network of personally owned computers. Windows 7 Pro does not have the ability to do NFS. I want to share my files to a WIndows 7 computer. I have to use SAMBA. I can't make it share files. I am not finding getting information on what to do easy
Then you are seriously looking in the wrong place. For setting up Samba use the SAMBA PROJECT DOCUMENTATION AND NOTHING ELSE, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE. There are trainloads of WRONG and obsolete information on the 'net about Samba. The documentation provided by the project is very good and well organized. Especially just the smb.conf manual page [already on your computer] is a good read. See the section "NOTE ABOUT USERNAME/PASSWORD VALIDATION" in `man smb.conf`. Searching the smb.conf man page immediately turns up: "Sections may be designated guest services, in which case no password is required to access them. A specified UNIX guest account is used to define access privileges in this case." Guest access is a but confusing. But generally it is [share] .. guest ok = yes ... as long as you have a valid guest user configured and map bad user to guest. Make 110% sure that guest account = indicates a real valid user account; that is the most common mistake for guest account setup. And that user must have permissions to access/modify the underlying folder.
and I see no place to turn off username/ password.
Because it is impossible. You have to map bad user to a valid guest account.
In YAST configuration for SAMBA I see no place to turn off username / password.
Because you can't; you just manage failure to authenticate into a guest state.
In SWAT I see no place to turn off username / password. Even on the local machine if I try and browse SMB I am prompted for a username / password.
Yep.
Like I said I checked the Wiki and the articles and openSUSE.org
See the Samba project documentation. I agree it is confusing; there is no reason for a distribution to have any pages or documentation about Samba; everything should just point the user to samba.org. Setting up Samba, Postfix, Named, ... or whatever service really has nothing to do with openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, OpenBSD, AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, etc... it is sad that distribution-mindedness has gunked up the search for documentation to such an extent. Other than where a few files might be found the distribution is pretty much irrelevant once whatever the appropriate package manager is has installed the software.