monline

The manpage description of "read list" and "write list" might be a little bit confusing to a Samba-newbie like me. I thought that to restrict users I just had to set "read list" to an empty value and "write list" to a set of users+groups. However these do not work as I thought.

O'Reilly has a nice guide to Samba and they explain it more clearly: "These options can be used on a per-share basis to restrict a writable share or grant write access to specific users in a read-only share, respectively."

So neither of these does affect whether a user can access a share or not. For that you have to use the "valid users" directive.

Eg. if you want a share to be accessible by users of group1 and group2, but allow write only to members of group2, then you have to use the following directives for the share:

PS: of course you have to keep in mind that the rules in smb.conf do not override the OS-level permission rules. Eg. if you want to give access to a share to two groups, then you have to give world-wide access to the directory of that share since the directory on the OS-level can belong only to one group. Or you could use OS-level ACLs, but this is not very common in the linux world.