[Samba] ARGH... once again samba causes "permission" errors.

[Jeff Wiegley]

I've been doing unix sys. admin for nearly 20 years and yet EVERY single
time I have to setup samba I have configuration problems.

Before we start let's clear up some common misunderstandings: I have
googled for the answer. I have spent the last six hours doing so and trying
various "suggestions". Most of these suggestions point to solutions
involving chown or chmod.  These are not the problems (or I will be
very surprised).

# cat /etc/samba/smb.conf
[global]
         workgroup = CYTE.COM
         server string = CyteNAS
         netbios name = NAS
         hosts allow = 127., 10.0.10.

[nas]
         comment = NAS
         path = /mnt/nas
         force user = nas
         force group = nas
         read only = No

# cat /etc/samba/smbpasswd
nas:500:75891A0CAAF2F9828AE88C0FE87091EF:E8C4E8E10FEE888764D18AD4A0AC61F5:[U          
]:LCT-4C00625E:

# grep nas /etc/passwd
nas:x:500:500::/mnt/nas:/bin/bash

# grep nas /etc/group
nas:x:500:

# ls -al /mnt/nas
total 16
drwxrwxrwx 2 nas  nas  4096 May 28 17:01 .
drwxrwxrwx 3 root root 4096 May 28 15:04 ..

So before you tell me about "permission" problems please note the following
   1) The permissions on all the files is 777... EVERYBODY can do anything.
   2) samba IS configured to force the user and group to the owner of 
the share
       path anyways.
   3) The group and user exist and they have their passwords configured
        correctly.

I can map the share on my Windows 7 workstation. But any attempt to
create anything yields a pop-up window that says:

"You need permission to perform this action"
                               nas(\\NAS)
                               Space free: 89.7 GB
                               Total size: 97.0 GB

Why am I getting ANY permission problems??? Frankly. I don't think it is
a permission problem. (I set log level to 10; the output is long so I won't
include it because I looked through it and didn't see any errors reported
or any mention of permission denied.)

GRRRRRRR!

It gets worse. a 90GB NAS storage is pretty useless. The NAS is actually
a 6TB Raid5 array with an XFS filesystem. But if I actually mount it....

# /etc/init.d/smb stop
# mount /mnt/nas
# ls -al /mnt/nas
total 8
drwxrwxrwx 2 nas  nas     6 May 28 18:11 .
drwxrwxrwx 3 root root 4096 May 28 15:04 ..

see... no difference in permissions or ownership but now it is a mount
point.

Now I can't even map the samba share at all. All I get is a window
that says:

    "Attemping to connect to \\NAS\nas"
           (Cancel)

And it never seems to go away.

and yes, under both cases I can simply login as the user nas via
ssh and touch/mkdir or do anything I want and the files get created
just fine. Frankly I think this is another case of Windows presenting
the user with a misleading diagnostic "Permission" problem when
something much more fundamental is going wrong with Samba.

Please help.

- Jeff