Sharespace public shares not showing up in Win 7 file explorer Network view

Hi all,

I’m currently unable to see WDShareSpace public shares in file explorer under Network in Windows 7. They simply don’t show up. I can map drives by address or servername and even see all the public shares by entering \<ip-address\ or \WDShareSpace\ into the file explorer address bar. But public shares simply aren’t visible by default.

Please note that they *were* visible when I first added the drive to my network a week ago, but in the last couple of days they’ve simply disappeared. This makes it very difficult for me to show my wife how to get at her data.

I believe this may be a problem with samba’s share advertisement, but I don’t know enough about samba to know how to fix the problem. Any ideas would be appreciated. I have the ability to ssh into the drive and change any configuration options on the samba server I need to (I haven’t cause this problem by doing this sort of thing, btw).

Thanks in advance,

John

I’ve discovered that this problem is related to the way the samba version on the wdsharespace interacts with win7 netbios name services. I have 3 computers (plus a laptop that comes and goes) on the same network with the wdsharespace. all 4 computers run windows 7 ultimate. This problem occurred when one of these computers became the netbios master and stayed that way though a dhcp address change on the wdsharespace. Once the address changed, I had to reboot the netbios master machine in order for it’s nbns cache to pick up the new address and share it with the other macihines on the network.

To find your master, download nbtscan.exe from http://unixwiz.net/tools/nbtscan.html and run the following command from a command prompt:

c:> nbtscan -f 192.168.1.0/24

Change the network address for yours - e.g., if you’re on a 10.1 network, use 10.1.1.0/24. This will scan port 137 on all 255 addresses in the 10.1.1.* network and display detailed netbios name service info for each one. (Note that you must use -f not /f.)

Look for the one containing the name …__MSBROWSE__.<01>. It tells you that this system won the nbns election and is the server for nbns information to this subnet. If you’ve had a dhcp address change on your wdsharespace device since the last time this system was restarted, you may have to restart the nbns master to get it to pick up the new sharespace address.

–john