USB fat32 samba problems

Hey,

I have a problem and the solution that I found myself. Since I cannot find this on the Mepis forum I will post it for others to possibly learn from my mistakes *Grins*.

I have a Western digital 250Gb USB hard drive (formatted in fat32 for windows compatibility reasons) that I wanted to mount and use as a samba share with read + write permissions for the computers behind my router.

The problem:
I have other computers (3 winXP and 1 Debian) that have differnet logins (for my wife and I) - these other systems could not write to the drive.

The facts:
The drive mounted fine in Mepis with no errors.
You could browse the drive, and read from it.
All other samba entries mount and work fine.

I tried changing the drive entry in /etc/fstab - did not work.
I tried making users and passwords for the other computers with smbpasswd - also did not work.

The solution:
I Forced the logged in user in the /ect/samba/smb.conf file, this is not a problem because this user automatically logs in at boot. (A story for another day).

Here is the copy of my smb.conf entry that worked:

[250GB_USB_DRIVE]
path = /mnt/sdb1
comment = External Storage

; this is my auto-logged in user
force user = autologin

case sensitive = no
msdfs proxy = no
delete readonly = yes
browsable = yes
writeable = yes
guest ok = yes
public = yes

I think read / write problem happens because usb drives are mounted by the users name and group that is logged in at the time and not by the system in Mepis? (Any other suggestions?) Or is this some limitation of Fat32? Anyone else have problems like this? Or perhaps another solution?