Gorazd and LoneBoneman, I can't thank you enough for pointing me in the right direction for a solution to my own Samba and Windows file sharing problems!
To help anyone who might stumble on this thread in the future, this was my situation.
My boyfriend and I started out with 7 computers on our home network including:
- 1 Arch Linux NAS
- 1 Arch Linux laptop
- 1 Ancient XP laptop
- 2 Windows 7 Pro laptops
- 1 Windows Pro desktop
- 1 Windows 10 desktop
We both work in IT and don't believe in throwing out old systems. We just re-purpose them and put them into semi-retirement. They were all happily sharing files back and forth as needed.
The problems started when we got a 2012 Mac Mini to serve as the controller for a massive backup drive.
All of the machines could see the SMB (Samba) share we created *except* for the XP laptop and the Win7 Pro desktop. Since the SMB share was created to house the backups of the various machines, they *all* have to be able to read and write to it. Failure was not an option. It was clearly a problem on the two machines that couldn't connect to the Backups share because 5 of the 7 computers were connecting just fine.
My partner and I must have spent 18 hours trying to find the fix. We tried all of these things and more:
1) Deleted and recreated the network profile on the Mac Mini at least half a dozen times trying to force the correct NetBIOS and Workgroup values to persist. That didn't work because of an old bug in the MacOS version of Samba.
Fun fact - We finally had to open a terminal window on the Mac Mini and do the following to force the NetBIOS profile settings to persist (good thing MacOS is essentially Linux):
$> sudo vi /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist
Look for the "<key>NetBIOSName</key>" entry
Remove or update all of the NetBIOS name entries to suit your needs
$> sudo Killall -9 cfprefsd
reboot the Mac
2) Made around a dozen registry changes having to do with network compatibility between the two machines
3) Made around a dozen group policy changes having to do with network compatibility
4) Setup a NetBIOS / WINS server (using NMBD in Samba) on the Arch Linux NAS
5) Changed the IP address of the Mac Mini
6) Changed the hostname of the Mac Mini
7) Bypassed the hostnames by trying to map the Backups share using the IP address of the Mac Mini
8) Added entries to the /etc/hosts file on the Mac Mini for each of the computers that were trying to connect to the Mac Mini.
And none of that worked.
What finally worked for both the ancient XP laptop and the very old Win7 desktop (which was upgraded from XP) was a combination of your two suggestions:
1) Making this change in Windows Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy > Local Policies (on left panel) > Security Options >
"Network Security: LAN Manager Authentication Level" > Set this to "Send NTLMv2 responses only"
2) Running regedit.exe
3) Navigating to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LmCompatibilityLevel
3) Modifying the DWORD value from 0 to 3
4) Rebooting the machine
Joy of joys, now all of the machines can backup to the new share.
And it wouldn't have been possible without your guidance! Thanks so much for posting what worked for you or we might still be trying to fix it!
