I have set up a special user for read only samba shares. I set him up in Samba and as a system user. I shared a couple of folders but that user cannot access them. I know samba is working because I also shared them with the main user of the system which is an admin account and it works fine.
How can I allow this user to have read permissions on all the directories I want to share without changing anything for any other users of the system? For example, I don't want to give him ownership of any of the files/directories. Just ongoing recursive read access. ongoing recursive is important. If someone adds a file or directory, I still want him to automatically be able to read it.
For the lazy, there's system-config-samba in the repository ( requires X though) through which you can configure your samba server a la windows point and click way. Samba user by default are separate from linux users, unless you configure samba to use /etc/passwd for user management, and in which case your samba server will forward the underlying permissions. Or you could let samba do its own thing, in which case you would have to map the samba user(s) to one or more linux user(s) and samba will write in the file system as the linux users for you. Either ways, don't forget to sudo service smbd restart after you change something.