Session request failed (131,129) with myname=HOBBES destname=CALVIN Not listening for calling name If you get this when talking to a Samba box then it means that your global "hosts allow" or "hosts deny" settings are causing the Samba server to refuse the connection. Look carefully at your "hosts allow" and "hosts deny" lines in the global section of smb.conf. It can also be a problem with reverse DNS lookups not functioning correctly, leading to the remote host identity not being able to be confirmed, but that is less likely. System error 1240 means that the client is refusing to talk to a non-encrypting server. Microsoft changed WinNT in service pack 3 to refuse to connect to servers that do not support SMB password encryption. There are two main solutions: enable SMB password encryption in Samba. See the encryption part of the samba HOWTO Collection disable this new behaviour in NT. See the section about Windows NT in the chapter "Portability" of the samba HOWTO collection When getting the list of shares available on a host using the command smbclient -N -L the program always prompts for the password if the server is a Samba server. It also ignores the "-N" argument when querying some (but not all) of our NT servers. No, it does not ignore -N, it is just that your server rejected the null password in the connection, so smbclient prompts for a password to try again. To get the behaviour that you probably want use smbclient -L host -U% This will set both the username and password to null, which is an anonymous login for SMB. Using -N would only set the password to null, and this is not accepted as an anonymous login for most SMB servers. Some OSes (notably Linux) default to auto detection of file type on cdroms and do cr/lf translation. This is a very bad idea when use with Samba. It causes all sorts of stuff ups. To overcome this problem use conv=binary when mounting the cdrom before exporting it with Samba. We are unable to keep individual users from mapping to any other user's home directory once they have supplied a valid password! They only need to enter their own password. I have not found *any* method that I can use to configure samba to enforce that only a user may map their own home directory. User xyzzy can map his home directory. Once mapped user xyzzy can also map *anyone* elses home directory! This is not a security flaw, it is by design. Samba allows users to have *exactly* the same access to the UNIX filesystem as they would if they were logged onto the UNIX box, except that it only allows such views onto the file system as are allowed by the defined shares. This means that if your UNIX home directories are set up such that one user can happily cd into another users directory and do an ls, the UNIX security solution is to change the UNIX file permissions on the users home directories such that the cd and ls would be denied. Samba tries very hard not to second guess the UNIX administrators security policies, and trusts the UNIX admin to set the policies and permissions he or she desires. Samba does allow the setup you require when you have set the "only user = yes" option on the share, is that you have not set the valid users list for the share. Note that only user works in conjunction with the users= list, so to get the behavior you require, add the line : users = %S this is equivalent to: valid users = %S to the definition of the [homes] share, as recommended in the smb.conf man page. A domain controller has to announce on the network who it is. This usually takes a while.