[CentOS] Easiest way to get samba up and working for Windows users?

Mon Feb 23 18:53:09 UTC 2009
Noob Centos Admin <centos.admin at gmail.com>

Everytime I have to setup samba to handle Windows users, sometime
inadvertently goes wrong or doesn't work the way I expected, or takes
forever to setup, especially when there are many users and various policies.
So far, the easiest, sureest and quickest method appears to be install
WindowsXP into VMWare and use it to handle Windows sharing. Needless to say,
this strucks me as rather ironic and stupid.

Thus could anybody please suggest a working frontend to samba that makes it
easy to add users, set their permissions and get something that works like
basic windows file sharing?

So far I've tried the following which all don't quite work.

1. CentOS's samba configuration tool
- added users never show up on the share configuration so the only shares it
could create was for public access.

2. Webmin
- thinks it added the users, but again they never show up when checked
against the bundled CentOS tool and needless to say, the shares never work
too

3. Samba SWAT
- Very confusing tool, selecting shares sometimes end up as another share,
and again, doesn't seem to work.


So I just need a very basic tool that will reliably allow me to do the
following
- specify user name, specify password, and maybe specify a group
- specify a share the user or group has read only or read/write access
- force new files/folders to take on group ID so that it behaves like a
normal windows share

Don't need print services or anything, it's just far easier to dump a
hardware print server into the network than to contemplate the additional
complexity of making something like CUPS work.

Just need to make sure that the Windows users can browse to the folders, get
a prompt for their login and password where needed.

Thanks!
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