Hi @Marenz,
I would like to first apologize for letting your message unanswered for several days… I wanted to get back with you earlier than that, but my current schedule is a lot busier than usual and leaves me with very little time to spend here.
Maybe a dedicated forum thread would be more appropriate to your issue, and we would then report here any fix or resolution that may come out of it. This way we could keep this “Announcement” thread as focused as possible.
To your issue now, I unfortunately am not aware of a single way to troubleshoot samba that would tell us everything, as so many factors are at play. I would thus start with the most obvious things (that you most likely already tried), but I’d rather make sure of these elements first before diving into something more complex than we should have been.
First, you have already done so, but I would make sure we start from a clean plate by deleting all your samba exports, and turning off your Samba service. Then, make sure apparmor is indeed turned OFF with systemctl status apparmor.
Second, click on the configure Samba service in the webUI, and make sure to fill in your WORKGROUP. Do you also use to use custom global options or did you use to let it blank?
Third, click submit to save the configuration file. You can also verify that all was written correctly by looking at the file: cat /etc/samba/smb.conf.
Fourth, toggle the Samba service ON. When troubleshooting like that, I usually like to have a terminal session open at the same time and monitor the logs with journalctl -f so that I can see what is happening. You should see mentions that smb and nmb are turning ON, and then a message from nmb telling you that this computer is now the master of your workgroup after a few seconds (that one can take a minute to appear sometimes).
Fifth, export one share with the settings you’d like, and make sure the settings were correctly applied to /etc/samba/smb.conf. If you are still monitoring the system logs, you should see that the Samba service is restarted to refresh its configuration (which means the same messages as in step 4 above should appear).
Sixth, regarding your client, you mentioned windows, but can you tell us which version by any chance? Also, you said you were able to see your share exported correctly, but were having an issue trying to connect to it: could you get more information? Are you using the WORKGROUP\user format for the username? Would you be lucky enough to have an explicit error message? I know Windows is terrible at giving useful information in its error messages, unfortunately, so we usually only get a useless “Acces denied”…
The best way to see what is happening is to monitor the samba logs themselves: /var/log/samba/*.log if my memory is correct. You will see several ones and all will have different information. You could try to monitor all of them at once while trying to (1) see the share from your Windows client and (2) after entering your credentials and actually trying to access it, but we will probably be drowned in information. Best chance at first would be to monitor the following ones at first:
smb.log- the one having your client’s IP in its name
- the one having your client’s hostname in its name
You will see a lot of information, and warning messages as well, but hopefully these would prove helpful. There’s a lot more troubleshooting that can be done as well, but let’s start with that at first, at least.
Hope this helps,