[Samba] A simple stand-alone scenario but "public" share doesn´t work

[Rolf Deenen]

Dear list,

For a simple home-network i recently installed Debian Etch on an extra
machine to act as server. It stores my mail, it acts as

webserver, firewall, dns-, dhcp- and database-server. All of these
services are running like a charm. The only thing left is

to get samba running. Well, it is running, but to get it running how i
want it to is a different matter i suppose, for i am

quite stuck here.

First, let me explain what i want. On my network there are two users,
"rolf" and "ingrid". I want both these users to have a

personal share on the server as well as a shared directory. Samba
version 3.0.24 is installed on the computer for this. I´ve

added these two statements in my /etc/samba/smb.conf :

[homes]
    comment = Home Directories
    browseable = no
    path=/home/%U/Documents
    writable = yes
    create mask = 0700
    directory mask = 0700

[shared]
    comment = Shared Directories
    browseable = no
    path=/home/samba/Documents
    writable = yes
    create mask = 0770
    directory mask = 0770
    browseable = yes

I added both users to the smb password database using the smbpasswd
command. After booting my windows XP laptop and logging

into the machine (local logon) with the same username-password
combination as i am known on the server i can see the contents

of \\Myservername. I see a share "rolf" and a share "shared". I can
access the share "rolf" without a problem, and create and

delete content on it. However, i  cannot get into the "shared" share
getting "access denied". The only way to get to the

share is by doing a "chmod 777" on /home/samba . I dislike this idea
very much. The filesystem-rights on this directory on

the server are as follows:

drwxrwx---  3 root       users      4096 2007-12-27 22:43 /home/samba

As such all groupmembers of the group "users" can access the
directory. They can however not access the "share", even though

they are members of the correct group.

While searching for information about this i am drowning in
information about things like authentication, group membership

and uid-to-sid-mapping. So much that i am losing overview. I therefore
have the following questions (to begin with :-) )

1. Should the above setup work and give the users "rolf" and "ingrid"
to the "shared" share?
2. Is there anybody else, using the same configuration who is willing
to explain how he/she did this?
3. Is there any documentation about setting the described scenario up?

Like i said, I've searched all over the web, but i found it hard to
find relative information. Some documentation i found

seem to suggest that the setup I've described here should simply work.
Other documentation describe setting up a similar

environment, but want to make the server a domain controller,  and the
samba howto gives so much information that a can not

determine what part of this information is relevant.

Thanks in advance,
Rolf Deenen