Re the "username =" option of smb.conf. If you use a user.account without a password, strange things will happen. You may (or may not) be asked to supply a password anyway. Whether or not you are asked to supply a password seems to depend upon the length of the user.account string. If you are asked, you must supply at least 2 blanks, at which point you shrug your shoulders and assume it is just a quirk and all is OK. Wrong. If you are trying to connect to an MPE group, you will probably have difficulty creating files. If you are trying to connect to an HFS directory (that has been chmod 777), you will probably be able to create files, but general permission problems will likely occur leading to considerable confusion. So what is going on? It appears that even though you use the "username =" option, if there is no password you are attached as the GUEST user (this even though specifying "guest ok = no"). Files that are created get the guest user ID as owner. If the username has a password, then it appears the owner of created files is either the user.account or the user the smbmon job is running under. And this depends upon the capabilities of the user specified in "username=". Does anyone know if there is a complete explanation of security/permissions for Samba on MPE? If you made it this far, you may be asking why I want to use the "username =" option with a user.account that has no password - seems to violate good security principles. You would be right, it does. However, I have 10-20 users that will be accessing three HP3000s through Samba and they all have NT Workstation - which means in order to use passwords, I have to do a register hack on 10-20 machines to enable unencrypted passwords. Not a pretty prospect. John Burke e-mail: [log in to unmask]