Samba guest access

I was trying to share some photos for my wife to download from my linux desktop machine (CentOS 6). I had ~10Gig of photos but she only wanted a hand full. I though the best option would be to share out the folder using samba and she can use windows explorer to pick the ones she wants

Well it seems simple now but it took a few tries to get it working.

I use security=server which is not the most secure method but it is normally easy & convenient. It also seems to be poorly documented, particularly for more recent samba releases and versions of Windows.

My wife has an account on the password server but not on my new desktop. Guest access I though would be a simple solution here but no so. The problem is that guest access will not work by default when using security=server (despite what the man page says). There is a new setting called map to guest which defaults to Never. I had to change this to Bad User to get it to work.

There are the relevant parts from my working smb.conf:

security = server
password server = myserver

map to guest = Bad User

[photos]
comment = John's photos
path = /home/jnewbigin/photos
guest ok = yes
writable = no
force user = jnewbigin

So now it is working and I am happy and my wife is happy too.