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 what it is worth, I couldn't access my samba share, maybe you have forgotten to add you username to the samba password group (for lack of beter description phrase)

this is what I did to get mine to work

smbpasswd -a username

after by using nautilus, shared my drive/folder with right-click, sharing, etc.

create your password, and use your username and passsword (which you just entered) to access your samba drive, you can also map this drive in Windows

hope this could help

For Fedora 25, I am not familiar with fedora version numbers but I am with RHEL/Centos 7.x If you have selinux enabled by default, you might try as root setenforce 0 to temporarily put selinux into permissive mode until next reboot, see if this allows samba access to work. If so then it's a selinux problem, and in RHEL/Centos there is etc/samba/smb.conf.example which explains the samba related selinux commands needed to allow samba shares to work with selinux set to enforcing.

For your version of fedora, I would work off the /etc/samba/smb.conf.example.

for reference here is my working smb.conf from an older version of samba showing what i believe is the minimum required to get it to work. If you go too restrictive with settings then you can prevent a successful connection so sometimes it's best to not specify which generally means allow for all.

In your [myshare] take out allow hosts and valid users. Once samba working then consider adding restrictive measures like these as necessary.

[global]
#       min protocol = SMB1 needed for winxp
        min protocol = SMB1
#       max protocol SMB2 needed to work with win10, unspecified for this older version of samba is smb1.
        max protocol = SMB2 
        security = user
        passdb backend = tdbsam
#       map to guest = never prevents popup option, bad user allows popup in windows
        map to guest = Bad User

[data]
    path = /data
    read only = No
#   guest ok = no
#   create mask = 660
#   directory mask = 770

with guest ok = no, and map to guest bad user, will allow popup in windows giving anyone a chance to enter correct linux username and pw. map to guest never prevents popup, meaning the username of the windows user has to be the same as a valid local user in linux, per security=user. You likely do not need min/max protocol specified, I do in samba version 3.6. I don't know what verion of samba u have in fedora 25, if it's samba 3.x then try specifying the min/max protocol.

don't forget to do smbpasswd -a <username on your linux system.

Considering "non-root through Samba", especially in new releases of OpenSuse (...15.3 -- 15.4), I do few movements into normal configuration panels (no sudo commands or anything technical).

Using Yast Firewall section -- For now (immediate solution):
I turn off the firewall, then see what you can turn on (after this) to keep the samba working with Microsoft Windows.

More details on how to do this with images on my website.

I recommend to create a dedicated user for that share and specify it in force user(see docs).

Create a user (shareuser for example) and set the owner of everything in the share folder to that user:

adduser --system shareuser
chown -R shareuser /path/to/share

Then add force user and permission mask settings in smb.conf:

[myshare]
path = /path/to/share
writeable = yes
browseable = yes
public = yes
create mask = 0644
directory mask = 0755
force user = shareuser

Note that guest ok is a synonym for public.

I just did it by sharing the folder normally (to the Guest user) and then simply changing the folder's permissions to allow write and deny read to Guest, like so:

In my case it can also be accessed from OS X, where the Windows' shared folder is mounted but it looks empty/unopenable. This message pops up when copy files to it:

If you need to share it from an OS other than Windows, look for ACL in your OS.