Last Updated: February 25, 2016
·
4.739K
· ioquatix

Guest Samba access on Mac OS X

I've been having problems with accessing my Samba server from Mac OS X - authenticated access worked fine, but trying to browse the shares from my other Mac laptop wasn't working. I didn't realise this but I was missing an important part of the configuration. Before, I'd see the server in the Finder, click on it and get "Connection Failed", using smbutil from the command-line gave similar errors:

> smbutil view -g //HINOKI
smbutil: server rejected the authentication: Authentication error

Simply adding the following to the /etc/samba/smb.conf

[global]
    map to guest = bad user

and restarting the server caused everything to start working on Mac OS X:

> smbutil view -g //HINOKI
Share                                           Type    Comments
-------------------------------
media                                           Disk    Hinoki Media
dropbox                                         Disk    
IPC$                                            Pipe    IPC Service (hinoki Samba)

3 shares listed