[Samba] Problems with Samba share access

[Rich Bloch]

Hello all,

I'm having some trouble getting my Debian-based NAS running correctly
with Samba permissions.

For trouble-shooting purposes, I have three machines of interest:

--MACHINE A: NAS (running Debian/2.6), the machine I want to share
folders
--MACHINE B: Windows Vista: Samba read/write share access works great,
no problems
--MACHINE C: Linux (running Debian/2.6) machine: SHARE ACCESS VERY
SLOW/FAILS

So, my problem is that when I attempt to share MACHINE A with MACHINE
C, I see the following behavior:

1) "Authentication Required" dialog pops up, requesting authorization
for guest at DOMAIN_NAME on DOMAIN_NAME (where DOMAIN_NAME is my
workgroup name)
2) After providing a password, I get a second "Authentication
Required" dialog, this time indicating authorization for
USER_NAME at DOMAIN_NAME on DOMAIN_NAME (where USER_NAME is my user name)
3) After providing a password again, some time passes--on the order of
30-90 seconds--and this second dialog again is displayed.

At this point, I either see this process repeated (repeat step 3
indefinitely), and never get access granted, or--after another 30-90
seconds--I finally receive access to the Samba shares. In the event I
do get access granted, I have no problems with access for the rest of
my session (until session restart or machine restart). So it seems
something is getting cached.

So, clearly, there appears to be some sort of negotiating happening
here between MACHINE A (the Samba server) and MACHINE C (the Samba
client).

Some details:

--Both machines are running Samba 3.0.24
--smb.conf is config'd with security = SHARE; specific shares with
read only = No, and guest ok = Yes
--I have no problems with share access between MACHINE A (NAS device:
the Samba server) and MACHINE B (Windows Vista: the Samba client)

So, here are my questions:

--What might cause this kind of behavior? How can I get rid of these
long authentication delays?
--What tools are available to me for troubleshooting a Samba
negotiation?

Thanks much.