I’m currently writing up changes to the perfect, cheap NAS [1]. A major change is that I dropped support for user-level windows/samba shares and am using only a few public browsable shares. It turns out that Windows clients always ask the user for a password even though the samba share is anonymous. The reason seems to be that Windows submits the logged in user’s credentials which causes Samba to validate them, fail the validation and prompt for credentials.
So my current setup for anonymous, read-only shares looks like this:
[global]
server string = fileserver
workgroup = WORKGROUP
netbios name = %h
guest account = readonly
syslog only = yes
syslog = 2
load printers = no
writeable = no
printable = no
[Movies]
comment = Movies
path = /mnt/snapraid/pool/Movies
available = yes
browsable = yes
writable = no
public = yes
guest ok = yes
Resources
[¹] Building the perrect, cheap DIY NAS
George's Techblog 