This is something that annoys a lot of people, fortunately the Redhat style OS's are the most simple in this respect. I disagree that Debian's way makes sense, it is more of a hackish approach in how they implement iptables. Anyway, for those who are using Redhat/Centos style OS's it is very simple. Set your rules from the shell/command prompt and to save the iptables firewall rules so they are remember/loaded on boot just run this command: service iptables........

This will give you the basic info needed to browse and connect to Samba shares from the command line. From the GUI of Gnome or KDE etc, it is pretty standard and straight forward. However, I've found very little guides on how to do it from the command line and if you're like me, a nerd who prefers command line for its simplicity and for remote use, this is the way to go. First get a list of all the Samba/SMB shares on the target. smbclient -L hostname........