Dear all, I'm new to Samba and am trying to set it up on an Ubuntu 12.04 system using version 3.6.3 . Thanks to some great documentation, I actually have it *working* as I had intended. However, there is something puzzling me which I cannot figure out from any of the documentation I've seen (so far). What I would like to do is to share 3 different sets of folders: * home directories * home-like directories -- a path where there are directories, one for each user, inside * a group directory -- for all users of a Unix group This is what I have: [homes] comment = Home Directories browseable = no writeable = yes create mask = 0700 directory mask = 0700 valid users = %S ; guest ok = no [home2] comment = Secondary Home Directories path = /share/home2 browseable = no writeable = yes create mask = 0700 directory mask = 0700 valid users = user1 user2 ; guest ok = no [accounting] comment = Account group path = /share/accounting browseable = no writeable = yes create mask = 0770 directory mask = 0770 valid users = @accounting And surprisingly, it works! But, I'm not sure why...and would like to understand why it is working and more importantly, is it a fluke that will go away in a few days. I understand "[homes]" is special and when Samba sees it, it looks for user accounts inside that directory. But for both [homes2] and [accounting], I've given paths in two different ways. The first, it is the path one-level up from what I want to share (i.e., because I want it treated like a "home" directory). But with the second, I want to share /share/accounting and not /share/accounting/user1, etc. Somehow, it seems to work as I'd like it. Is there a reason why this works? The alternative which I wanted to avoid was for [homes2], I'd have to create one entry for each user on the system. So, I'm very happy it works...just wondering why and if it is by some luck... :-) Thank you! Ray