So I went to System > Administration > Server Settings > Samba and added a folder to share and initially set it to guest access to get things going.
I couldn't access this one and only share on this server with guest access from either my Windows laptop (XP Pro SP3) or a Leopard server (10.5.8) so I changed the settings to use user authentication and added my local user details (this is a stand alone file server with one user and the root user running CentOS 5.4).
I made sure I hadn't put the entries in iptables incorrect by stopping iptables (sudo /etc/init.d/iptables stop, which executed just fine). SELinux kept popping up so I disabled that and restarted the server also. So now with no iptables nor SELinux enabled flicking between guest and user access I still can't access the share (I have also tried authenticating as root to no avail), my Windows and Mac test machines are erroring out saying they don't have permissions to access the share (I am an administrator on both machines so its not a local permissions issue).
There are no firewall restrictions between my test machines and the CentOS server as I would even get prompted for authentication so that's not a problem and my test machines work fine because I can mount smb shares on other files servers in the same subnet as the CentOS server, what's going on?
Ideas are welcome! Thanks for reading...