Rick, are you running iptables?  Running any other servers?  Can you connect
locally with them?  I've found that the default security on RedHat servers
is tight enough that you have to address the iptables issues for anything
you want to do.

Give that, samba is one of those configuration nightmares where you hack
your smb.conf file again and again until finally, long after you've lost
track of what you're doing, it starts to work the way you want it to, and
you just settle for function instead of understanding.  Once you have a
working configuration, you tend to copy that configuration file to new
machines rather than trying again to go through the config process.

This is a bit like sendmail was before the m4 process was developed, so I
think we can expect that someone will come up with a functional tool
eventually.