I have just made a Ubuntu server (16.04.1 LTS) and I have followed all the tourials on how to make one and it is not showing up in Windows!!! The only settings I have changes in smb.conf is
Workgroup = SANCTUARY
Sanctuary is my workgroup
And in Share definitions I made this
[Nic]
Comment = Nic
Path = /server/Nic
Browsable = yes
Read only = no
Guest ok = no
Then I restarted
Thank you and if you have have an answer I would greatly appreciate it
The google ranking of this answer is high, so I thought I'd contribute the current Windows 10 solution.
Windows 10 no longer supports NetBIOS discovery.
You can fix this by enabling the insecure SMBv1 (or so I've read), but that's a bad idea and you have to do it on all your clients. The best way is to implement Web Service Discovery on your Linux server.
wsdd accomplishes this. Pre-made service files are available from the guy's git also (although for Ubuntu I had to change the group from nobody to nogroup to get it to work). It works great.
I had a similar issue where I was trying to share files between a Linux Mint 18 Samba server and a Windows 10 workstation. Through some digging I found this process:
Check your /etc/samba/smb.conf for syntax errors by running:
testparm
Ideally we are looking for this on stdout there somewhere:
Loaded services file OK.
If you are using system-config-samba, let's squash a bug:
sudo touch /etc/libuser.conf
sudo chmod 644 /etc/libuser.conf
Now restart the samba server any number of ways depending on your distro. Here's a few examples of that: How to restart samba server?
sudo service smbd restart
sudo service nmbd restart
Now that's done, we can check to be sure the smbd and nmbd processes are running with this:
ps aux | grep mbd
You should get something like this:
root 18379 0.0 0.2 337912 15856 ? Ss 03:04 0:00 smbd -D -s /etc/samba/smb.conf
root 18386 0.0 0.0 240452 5988 ? Ss 03:04 0:00 nmbd -D -s /etc/samba/smb.conf
If they aren't running, fire them up. Check your syslog for errors.
(where the smb server isn't showing up in the network).
Now the fun part. Open a file explorer window and in the address bar type the name of your samba server and append a '.local' to it such as this:
\\mysambaserver.local
If you have configured samba correctly, it'll pop right up. Afterward, you could right click this server in explorer and create a shortcut in the start menu or your quick access list.
I give credit where it's due: Credit goes to altair4 on the Linux Mint forums (a beast). If you have more questions about this method, do yourself a solid... check his post to see if you missed anything during setup or configuration.
First: Did you restart the smbd service?
The best way to diagnose is to try listing the shares,
smbclient -L yourhostname
And then accessing from your local computer:
smbclient //yourhostname/Nic
Source: https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/install.html
If success, then check your firewall for remote access: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/what-ports-need-to-be-open-for-samba-to-communicate-with-other-windowslinux-systems/
