If you’re running a Samba v.3 fileserver that has public shares and you can access them fine from a Windows or Linux workstation, but cannot access them from OS X Leopard, here’s how to solve the problem.

Problem: upon connecting to the fileserver via SMB or CIFS, you get prompted for a password, even though the shares are completely public.  If you tick the “Guest account” radio button and hit ok, Leopard throws you a “This file server does not allow guest access” message and you cannot access the share.

Solution: in the fileserver’s smb.conf file, edit the following:

  1. change “security=user” to “security=share”
  2. comment out “passdb backend = tdbsam” and “obey pam restrictions = yes”
  3. add a line saying “map to guest = bad user”
  4. comment out the lines beginning “passwd program =” and “passwd chat = “
  5. restart samba


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