[Samba] Basic Setup Question

[AndyLiebman at aol.com]

I have been struggling with SAMBA for about a month now. Wow, as a Windows 
user it's really infuriating trying to use SAMBA to put a Linux machine in my 
system. This is clearly the most frustrating aspect of Linux, in my opinion. 

All I want to do is make my Linux machine behave like any other Windows XP 
Professional machine in my office (I do confess, one of my employees brings in 
her own Windows XP Home machine. I hope that's not an issue.) 

I am not terribly concerned about security -- I have been using a Windows 
2000 Server for about a year to let video editors in my office access 2 terabytes 
of video files on a series of RAIDS attached to the server. There are only 7 
machines on my office network, and no real exposure to the outside. 

Now, I'm just trying to replace the Windows 2000 machine with a Linux machine.

On the Linux Machine (running the new Mandrake 9.2 with Samba 2.2.8a I think) 
I have created user accounts and passwords for each XP user. I used the same 
names the editors use to log onto their XP machines as well as the same 
passwords. I did NOT use the names of the XP Computers. That's my understanding of 
which name to use.) 

I also created samba passwords for each of those users with "smbpasswd". 

I made a very simple smb.conf file: 

But here's what happens. 

I can access the Linux shares from the Windows XP machines SOMETIMES. Usually 
the first time I click on the Linux computer (localhost) in Windows Explorer, 
I get an error. But the second time I click I can usually connect and see the 
Linux shares. 

But sometimes -- after being able to read and write to the Linux shares for 
hours -- I suddenly get back a message "Localhost is not accessible. You might 
not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of 
this sever to find out if you have access permissions.   You were not 
connected because a duplicate name exists on the network. Go to System in Control 
Panel to change the computer name and try again." 

The only way to gain access to the Linux shares again is to reboot the 
Windows XP machine. 

Does anybody know what's going on here? 

If I can get that issue straightened out, then I have another question. How 
do I set up SAMBA so that when a user writes a file to the shared folder, the 
file can be read AND ALTERED by anyone who can access the the share. It's 
crucial that users be able not only to read all files, but also modify and delete 
them. 

Finally, I would ALSO like to know how I can make it so that the files 
written to some Linux shares can be read by everybody but only modified or deleted 
by the computer (not the people, but the machine) that created the data. 

Appreciate your time. Thanks for reading this. 

Andy Liebman