Here are some good troubleshooting steps, shamelessly copied from ServerFault:

1. Maybe your Windows host is prepending your username with the wrong domain name. From the Windows machine, try to login using localhost\simon as the username
2. Issue sudo pdbedit -L (must run as root) and check if user simon is listed. If so, set a trivial password (you can change it later) using smbpasswd simon
3. If user simon is not listed, try to recreate it issuing smbpasswd -a simon
4. If it does not work, delete the passwd file (it is named passwd.tdb; for reference, it is found under /var/lib/samba/private/). Then, recreate your user issuing smbpasswd -a simon
5. If it still not working, try to use the root account issuing smbpasswd -a root and check if you can login using the root user. Note: this is only a try. After having done with it, you must delete root's entry issuing smbpasswd -x root
6. Your last resort is to increase the verbosity of logging and see if you can find clues there. For authentication attempts, edit or add the following line on your smb.conf: log level = 2 winbind:5, check the logs with something like tail -f /var/log/samba/log* and try to login.

Hope some of it helps.

To access the samba share, please pay attention to:

1. You had to create a system user with the same username. In this case, please issue the following command: useradd -s /sbin/nologin benjamin
2. If you are using a SELINUX-enabled system (eg: CentOS), try to temporarily disable it issuing setenforce 0

EDIT: as the problem persists, try the following:

1. maybe your Windows host is prepending your username with the wrong domain name. From the Windows machine, try to login using localhost\benjamin as the username
2. issue pdbedit -L and check if user benjamin is listed. If so, set a trivial password (you can change it later) using smbpasswd benjamin
3. if user benjamin is not listed, try to recreate it issuing smbpasswd -a benjamin
4. if it does not work, delete the passwd file (it is named passwd.tdb; for reference, in a CentOS 6.x system it is found under /var/lib/samba/private/). Then, recreate your user issuing smbpasswd -a benjamin
5. if it still not working, try to use the root account issuing smbpasswd -a root and check if you can login using the root user. Note: this is only a try. After having done with it, you must delete root's entry issuing smbpasswd -x root
6. Your last resort is to increase the verbosity of logging and see if you can find clues there. For authentication attempts, edit or add the following line on your smb.conf log level = 2 winbind:5, check the logs with something like tail -f /var/log/samba/log* and try to login.

For all the people that didn't read the coments on the original post, Haxiel said:

The man page for smb.conf says that the guest ok = yes option allows clients to connect without a password and with the privileges of the guest account. The default guest account is the 'nobody' user.

The preferred approach in this case would be to create a dedicated user account for this purpose, give it the appropriate permissions on the shared path as per your requirement, and then modify your Samba config to use that account. (Syntax: guest account = ftp).

By design /media/$USER ( /media/drwade in this case ) will allow only one user to get past it and that is drwade. You are forcing the user to be "nobody". nobody != drwade so access is denied. Change your force user in the [Anonymous2] share definition to drwade:

force user = drwade

You've got a classic ownership/permissions problem here. You've told SAMBA to allow access to /home/hoster/sharetest only to equah but your underlying filesystem permissions deny access to that user (drwx------ 19 hoster hoster 4096 Sep 8 20:20 /home/hoster).

Allow equah access to the directory and it should be ok

chmod a+x /home/hoster

Or force the access by equah to be performed by hoster

# add to smb.conf share definition
force user = hoster

In general this kind of problem can be diagnosed using log level = 3 and looking in the SAMBA server log files.