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When connecting to samba, Windows asks for a password to IPC$

There are a few reasons for this:

1. Your username (the one from the Windows machine) doesn't match a user in the system, or doesn't match a user allowed to access that SMB share. Solution: create the user in the UNIX machine. By creating entries in both passwd and smbpasswd.
2. Your machine doesn't have a machine account in samba. Solution: Create the machine account in samba, by creating a user in passwd called machine$, with no password (the password field should be a *). Then, create the machine account in smbpasswd by running:

     smbpasswd -a -m machine
   

3. Encrypted passwords. If Windows (usually 98 or NT and up) is using encrypted passwords, and Samba isn't set up to deal with that, you will get a "password incorrect". Just find the line encrypt passwords = no in /etc/smb.conf and change if to encrypt passwords = yes, or simply add that line.

A simple, almost cheating, method is to simply disable the by-user security for samba. This reduces security by a lot in comparison to using the domain- or user-based security models of samba. To do this, simply set the value of security=share in smb.conf.

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