I have 4.2.7 running under FreeBSD 10.2 on my server-of-all-work (192.168.0.96), exporting / to all machines on the lan and nowhere else (I have a pfSense firewall box sitting out front helping to enforce the "nowhere else").  

Installing Apache 2.4 and PHP 7.0 on a Win 7 machine (192.168.0.21), I tried to assign a subtree in my Samba share as docroot so as to keep all the code in one place.  

Apache refuses to start, claiming that the subtree is not a directory, which of course it is.  It's readily accessible for reads, writes, copies, creates, and deletes by editors, shells, and the o/s on this W7 machine and on 2 XP machines (192.168.0.11 and .31).

Looking at the permits under W7, it appears that no one has any access, and trying to supply access fails with a "cannot save, parameter incorrect".  But that doesn't seem to bother anyone, unless it's bothering Apache.

I'm guessing that Samba is not doing something that Apache is looking for, because if I point docroot to a disk local to the W7 machine, everything works.

I had a fair bit of trouble getting this version of Samba running as compared to v3.6 which I'd used on several FreeBSD machines earlier. I'd to use several qualifiers (e.g. insecure wide links) that made no sense to me.  Is that difficulty significant?  No clue.

Here's the current config file

[global]
  passdb backend        = tdbsam:/usr/local/etc/samba/private/passdb.tdb
  workgroup             = ALBA
  server string         = Fileserver
  log file              = /samba.log
  log level             = 2
  case sensitive        = yes
  default case          = lower
  preserve case         = yes
  security              = user
  follow symlinks       = yes
  wide links            = yes
  allow insecure wide links = yes
  interfaces            = igb0 lo0
  bind interfaces only  = yes
  hosts allow           = 192.168.0.0/24 127.0.0.1
  preferred master      = yes
  load printers         = no


[all]
  path                  = /
  valid users           = root,me
  writable              = yes
  browseable            = yes
  public		= yes
  force directory mode  = 4777
  force create mode     = 4777
  force user            = root
  force group           = wheel