This one had me stumped for a while as the share could be seen from another machine, but could not be accessed with various messages ranging from "permission denied" to "The file is of an unknown type", but only if I tried to set the share up for anonymous guest access. Assigning a user name and password to the share allowed it to work correctly.

The solution was that the containing folder, in this case, my home folder, needed to have it's permissions set to allow others access the share.

Useful Samba tools for Gnome/Ubuntu users

Here are a couple of tools you might find useful if you are trying to resolve a Samba problem.

The thing to remember with these applications is that they won't show up any folders that you've shared using the folder properties dialog as these applications directly alter the samba.conf file, while the folder properties dialog writes a file into the /var/lib/samba/usershares folder for each of the shares that you create.

Both of these are available in the Ubuntu 9.10 repos.

gsambad

gsambad is a very full-featured and will let you configure every little setting in Samba, and make no mistake, there are a lot. It's also possible for you to royally screw up your configuration if you start changing things that you don't understand with this tool, so it's definitely recommended for the pro's. When you install this it will appear under the Applications->System Tools menu and is called gadmin-samba.

system-config-samba

A very basic folder sharing tool that provides a bit more control over the process than the default Gnome dialog. This will appear under the System->Administration menu under the name Samba when installed.