map to guest

This parameter can take four different values, which tell
smbd
8 what to do with user
login requests that don't match a valid UNIX user in some way.

The four settings are :

Never - Means user login requests with an invalid password are rejected. This is the default. Bad User - Means user logins with an invalid password are rejected, unless the username does not exist, in which case it is treated as a guest login and mapped into the .
Bad Password - Means user logins with an invalid password are treated as a guest login and mapped into the . Note that this can cause problems as it means that any user incorrectly typing their password will be silently logged on as "guest" - and will not know the reason they cannot access files they think they should - there will have been no message given to them that they got their password wrong. Helpdesk services will hate you if you set the map to guest parameter this way :-). Bad Uid - Is only applicable when Samba is configured in some type of domain mode security (security = {domain|ads}) and means that user logins which are successfully authenticated but which have no valid Unix user account (and smbd is unable to create one) should be mapped to the defined guest account. This was the default behavior of Samba 2.x releases. Note that if a member server is running winbindd, this option should never be required because the nss_winbind library will export the Windows domain users and groups to the underlying OS via the Name Service Switch interface.

Note that this parameter is needed to set up "Guest"
share services. This is because in these modes the name of the resource being
requested is not sent to the server until after
the server has successfully authenticated the client so the server
cannot make authentication decisions at the correct time (connection
to the share) for "Guest" shares.

Example: Bad User

map to guest

Registry Hive	HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Registry Path	Software\Policies\Samba\smb_conf\map to guest
Value Name	map to guest
Value Type	REG_SZ
Default Value	Never