Samba setup question: security setting

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

I've read many Samba HOWTOs but I always have trouble -- and never really
sure if I have it right.

On my home LAN I have two Windows machines (Win98 and WinME).  Neither are
setup with passwords -- well nothing that I would call a password.  I
think one machine gives a login prompt but I just hit enter.

Samba comes configured with user level security which I always have a hard
time getting setup.  I suppose it's my lack of understanding of Windows
networking.  

The other day I setup Samba for a friend who's running WinXP, and I
used "user" level access and (IIRC) used smbpasswd to add a password for
his account.  I think I had to setup an account on linux that matched the
username he had on WinXP, too.  Frankly, I just messed with it until it
worked.

Anyway, my question is about my home LAN.  Since the Windows machines do
not match users on the linux box I'm using share level access.  But I
think that's probably insecure.  For one thing, I had a share on directory
on the linux machine and when I connected from Windows it asked for the
password (for that user's directory).  I entered the password, asked
Windows NOT to keep the password, yet now I can always connect to that
share without a password![1]

Is it possible (and is it recommended) to move to security = user on my
home LAN when the Windows machines don't really have a password?  I guess
what I'm asking is how best to setup Samba and the Windows machines I'm
running.  And, more importantly, why I need to setup it up a given way.

Also, when I followed the instructions for setting up CUPS for printing
trying to print from Windows to linux asked for a password.  Password for
what user??

This is what I finally setup for my printer to allow access:

[printers]
   comment = All Printers
   browseable = no
   path = /tmp
   printable = yes
# change to public
   public = yes
   guest ok = yes
   writable = no
   create mode = 0700


[1] And why that stinks is that once the Windows machine got a virus and
was then able to write junk all over that share on the Linux machine.

-- 
Bill Moseley moseley@hank.org