Re: tip: Samba server not showing in Windows

On Wed, 2026-08-05 at 20:27 -0700, ToddAndMargo via users wrote:
> Samba server not showing in Windows:

Was there a question?

> smb.conf:
>      NetBIOS name should be uppercase
>      for example:
>          netbios name = SERVER

If you're posting tips, probably makes very good sense for that name to
be exactly the same name as the computer's hostname.  I wouldn't be
surprised if there's a bunch of people who set up several computers on
their LAN, and just had it saying the name was "SERVER" following these
kinds of notes.

Mine didn't have a NetBIOS name set, though I remember it being advised
to write the workgroup in upper-case, but I have no idea if upper-case
was really needed.

And they all really should be in the same workgroup.  There are ways of
interacting with other workgroups, but information was scant on
managing it (e.g. imagine a large office where you might have a finance
department group, and another research department, you might want them
keeping out of each other's affairs in general, but have something
common between them).

>      hosts allow's 127eed to have a "1" at the end
>      for example:
>          hosts allow = 192.168.202.0/24 127.0.0.1

It's been years since I used Samba and Windows, but I don't recall
having to add the loopback address, though I see that set in an old
config file here.  It wasn't clear why you'd need to do that, but they
may have some internal communication.

Thanks to how SMB works, whenever computers join a network they have a
little election amongst themselves to decide who's the browse master
(which coordinates a lot of the SMB networking).  This can mean a
breakdown of SMB networking for 15 minutes, every time a PC joins or
leaves (where hardly anything works in the meantime).  The bunfight
over who gets to be it is based on things like uptime, OS versions, and
who thinks they've got superior hardware in some kind of fashion.

It can be useful to stack the decks in favour of your preferred PC (or
PCs) to be the browse master (by setting it as the "preferred master",
and giving it a high "OS level" number), and to demote your preferred
clients (as being not the preferred master, and a lower OS level
number).

There was also suggestions about making your browse master the WINS
server and proxy, which is to do with Windows hostname resolutions
(this is going back to the days where it was very much ad-hock
networks, no DNS server, very much peer-to-peer).

-- 
 
uname -rsvp
Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64
(yes, this is the output from uname for this PC when I posted)
 
Boilerplate:  All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted.
I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list.
 

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