samba - Aug 1999 - security = user

Hello all:

I am having problems in getting samba to work in security = user mode.
Here's my setup:

Server:- Solaris 2.6 with samba-2.0.5a
Clients:- Win95 with plain text passwords enabled and they resolve the
samba server name through DNS. Also these machines authenticate to a
PDC.
Environment:- Not all my users have UNIX accounts (since they do not
need one)
but they do need access to resources like printers, CDROM, software
share etc.
I also have users who do have UNIX accounts and need access to their
homes.

Here's my simple smb.conf:

[global]
  guest account = pcguest
  security = user
  password level = 4
  load printers = yes
  printcap name = lpstat

[homes]
  comment = UNIX Home Dirs
  path = %H
  browseable = no
  writeable = yes
  valid users = %S

[soft]
   comment = Software Stuff
   path = /data/soft
   public = yes
   writable = yes
   write list = foobar

[printers]
  comment = UNIX Printer
  public = yes
  printable = yes


My problem seems to be that sometimes when a non UNIX user connects to a
public
share (like soft), they are prompted for a password and they never get
authenticated
since the client sends the username they logged into the client as and
since this does not
exist on the UNIX server, the username/password pair would always be
incorrect.
I can run the above setup in security = share mode and everything works
but it defeats the
purpose of having  write list = foobar ( he needs to upload software to
that directory) since
every user would connect to the share soft as user pcguest.

I seem to have found a way to make the above setup work by using map to
guest = Bad User
since this would map bad usernames to pcguest. My questions are:

- am I missing something or doing something wrong?
- is there another way of doing this?


All help/comments are greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Prasad Jampala

Hello,
I am having a slight problem with my samba configuration. When i set the
security = share i can see shares just fine as a guest, but when i change
the security to security = user then i can't even see my shares. I get the
following error: The network path was not found.


snip of smb.conf

...
[homes]
        valid users = %S
...

do you know what my problem could be? 

thanks for your help,

brian