Howto: Fix Windows share browsing issues

[lwfitz]

Howto: Fix Windows share browsing issues

You rock! Thank you for this. Worked like a charm on crunchbang 10.

[Brian Willian]

thank you, solve my problem.

[HotPlug]

Hi!!
Turns out the culprit was a CISCO VPN software that does some firewalling of its own. After removing it ping works fine AND ALL WINDOWS SHARES CAN BE BROWSED FROM NAUTILUS!! hooray

--hope this helps somebody,
Emil

Man, you saved the rest of my hairs from being pulled out in rage. I've spent 3 days tweaking samba and nsswitch without any success until I found your post. This stuped cisco anyconnect indeed somehow spoils windows shares browsing. '/etc/init.d/vpnagentd stop' resolved the issue.

Cheers, Emil.

[DestructiveLabs]

Thank you for this comprehensive guide! I have been combing the net for a few days trying to solve this problem. Every other guide wanted to only address your Problem 2. I would only get the error intermittently. So, obviously that wasn't the fix I needed and, for the life of me, I could not pin down the culprit. Turned out to be the Windows LIVE software that came with the Wife's laptop!! I uninstalled all LIVE components, restarted and BAM! Worked.

Running 12.04LTS on mine and Win7 on the Wife's laptop.

[axismann]

Correct me if I'm wrong but if you want to use wins in the nsswitch file, don't you need to have a wins server on the network? This post doesn't mention that for what I could tell. Maybe I over looked it. Oops! I did (Wins Support = Yes).

[dmizer]

Correct me if I'm wrong but if you want to use wins in the nsswitch file, don't you need to have a wins server on the network? This post doesn't mention that for what I could tell. Maybe I over looked it. Oops! I did (Wins Support = Yes).

In "Problem 3 - Part 2", my tutorial mentions that you need to install winbind for name resolution. Winbind is (among other things) a wins server. If you have a Windows machine on the network, then the Windows machine will have a wins server. There is a lot more to configuring a wins server than adding "Wins Support = yes" to the smb.conf file. You'll need to correctly configure nmbd and learn about "domain master", "local master", "local master browser", and "domain master browser", and how to identify and configure them. Otherwise your local Windows machines will wreak havoc on your NetBIOS name resolution.

To correctly configure nmbd for name browsing support, you'll need to do a lot of digging through here: http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/...-3/nmbd.8.html

And here:
http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/...mb.conf.5.html

Otherwise, I suggest turning off "wins support" in smb.conf and using winbind instead, because it mostly works out of the box in the largest variety of networking situations.

See also my post here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...7#post11612737
And here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...3#post11850323

[Ridgerunrbunny]

Oh, come on it can't be this complicated!

[gordintoronto]

99% of the time it isn't!

[dmizer]

Oh, come on it can't be this complicated!

It looks complicated because:

1. It is an omnibus tutorial which was created to provide fixes for more than one common NetBIOS resolution problem.
2. It's wordy because I took a lot of time explaining the "why" of the problems in hopes that people could find their own answers if mine did not fix their particular problem.
3. It addresses problems and fixes that changed across several versions of Ubuntu, some of which are out of date but I no longer have the time, motivation, nor experience to maintain the original tutorial.

[leinardo]

Is this tutorial supposed to work with Windows 8 and Ubuntu 13.04? Cause, I just tried it and it does not work.... Any ideas of what might be going wrong? I would post my smb.conf file, but it is the same as the default except for the changes that you have mentioned.