Samba, Debian, and Windows 7

I have a headless linux computer I use mainly as a file server, but also as a bit of an open source science toy.  I can start a ssh / VNC to it from anywhere in the house.  Until recently, it was running Ubuntu 11.04.  I attempted an upgrade to 11.10, but something went wrong and it left the system in a less than optimal state.

That's all right though, I was looking for an excuse to simplify it to straight Debian.   The Debian install went well, though I noticed I took for granted many of the packages that came installed by default in Ubuntu. (make anyone?)  A few apt-gets fixed all of that, though, and I was left with the last headache I remembered:  properly configuring samba to work with my Windows 7 computer.

"This shouldn't be hard", I thought remotely.

The best walkthrough I found was on http://www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/1524-standalone-samba-in-debian-squeeze - I simplified it a bit, since I'm okay with home users having access to their own directories.

My path went something like this:

1.  Make my Windows 7 workgroup name WORKGROUP by clicking start, right clicking "Computer", and hitting "properties" 
2. Install samba on the Debian computer with 'sudo apt-get install libcupsys2 samba samba-common'
3. I don't care about domain name for my simple setup, and I make sure my default workgroup is titled WORKGROUP during setup
4. After completion, sudo edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and uncomment the line 'security=user'
5. Under the [homes] section, add "valid users = my_username"
6. change the "read_only" from YES to NO to enable writing
7. save, quit, and restart samba with a sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart
8. FINALLY, remember that samba doesn't have access to your Linux login....so you must set the samba password for your username separately via 'sudo smbpasswd -a username'

At this point, you should be able to access the linux home directory, from windows, by typing in the network IP address into the path of a window...such as
\\192.168.1.9 and login with your user name and samba password

Tada