Ever since I installed Ubuntu Linux Hardy 8.04 I’m facing problems in browsing Windows shares with samba.

Even though I can see the Windows Group and the Windows Hosts when I click on them I only get an empty window. No shares are listed.

Through smbtree utility I managed to figure out the main problem was that I was using OpenDNS domain name servers. For some weired reasons OpenDNS dns try to resolve also local hosts and thus Samba cannot locate the local networked computer on which the shares are.

The error showed in smbtree when this output was shown:

timeout connecting to 208.69.34.132:445

clearly 445 is the Netbios port and 208.69.34.132 is an external IP linked to OpenDNS.

Reverting to my ISP DNS partially solved my problem.

Now smbtree does no more show all the computers in the network, however with GNOME Nautilus I can see them all and enter them. Nonetheless inside I can only see two folders: print$ ad public. I had configured several other shares restricted to a particular user, but these are not shown!

I noticed I can access these restricted to login shares by typing in the complete path i.e. smb://pc1/folder1 however I cannot actually access these folders (and no login prompt is shown) unless I substitute the shared pc (pc1) with its IP address.

Only this works:

smb://192.168.1.1/folder1

I wonder why there are all these problems with Hardy… the previous version, Gutsy worked flawlessly with Windows shares.

Any idea on how to display shared folders without Everyone ownership (whose access is restricted to a login)?
Any idea on how to access those folders without needing to know the server IP address?

On mounting samba shares with cifs (which is not what I aim to): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=288534