smbclient NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED

Question

About once every 10 years I need to wrestle with SAMBA as I migrate to new hosts, and then I repress the traumatic memory until I have to relearn it all the next time :S Hence this newbyish question.

I have a Ubuntu VM with a couple of shares - one ("Public") is unsecured, the other ("Public2") is secured, with the intention that it should be accessed only by an authenticated user account defined on the Ubuntu box. Both shares appear in Windows Explorer on both XP and Win8.1. However, I can't for the life of me work out how to log into the secure Public2 share.

Leaving Windows clients out of it, I've tried simply looping back to the box using smbclient, which produces the following output, indicating it just can't authenticate:

michael@ubuntu:~$ smbclient //ubuntu/Public2 --user=michael%mypasswd
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 4.1.6-Ubuntu]
tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED

Meanwhile the unsecured share is accessible. What (probably incredibly obvious) thing have I missed? Am I not specifying the username correctly?

/var/lib/samba/usershares/public (unsecure, works) contains:


#VERSION 2
path=/home/michael/Public
comment=
usershare_acl=S-1-1-0:F
guest_ok=y
sharename=Public

/var/lib/samba/usershares/public2 (which I can't access) contains:

#VERSION 2
path=/home/michael/Public2
comment=
usershare_acl=S-1-1-0:F
guest_ok=n
sharename=Public2

Answer 1

For users who are using for the command line option, use

$ sudo smbpasswd -a <user_name>

this will prompt you to assign the password.

Answer 2

WARNING: This refers to Samba 2. We are at Samba 4 now. Take care which version of Samba you are using. As stated in my comment, the GUI will break your configurations.

A work colleague has pointed me in the right direction:

The Linux user ID being used to access the Linux share needs to have a second "samba" password defined for it. The easiest way to do this is to install and run the GUI Samba Server Configuration app, which isn't installed by default.

The Samba documentation does explain this, but it's buried in the masses of documentation explaining all the various arcane aspects of samba.conf configuration etc.

The following article gets to the heart of the subject:

http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2014/05/ubuntu1404-file-sharing-samba/