Freenas 9.2.1.6 Win7 win8.1 network browser

[ITcat]

New to Freenas and Samba 4....not to systems.

Ran into the "can't see Freenas in windows network browser" issue. No chance to retrain staff let alone my teenagers to type \\server\share.

Read everything I could find without a working solution.....so I looked through the error logs.

First force Freenas to be the workgroup master browser:

add

domain master = yes
preferred master = yes
os level = 100

to the CIFS aux parameters.

Confirmed that freenas is now always the master browser when a "election" occurs (new computer boots).

Still no Freenas in the network browser......saw that when refreshing the network browser in windows a "no protocol" error was thrown......yet in Win 8.1 working shares had a SMB 3.00 connection. (Win 8.1 has an easy way to check).

Played with the settings.....came up with:

Server minimum protocol: set to NT1
Server maximum protocol: set to SMB3_00

Now all Win 7 and Win 8.1 computers see Freenas in the network browser and confirmed that shares are linked at SMB 3.00 in Win 8.1.

Booted a "never been on the network" Win 8.1 tablet.....same success.

Hope this will help others.....

 

[marcevan]

Thanks for the steps and good success.

I'm not sure the situation you have regarding login/guest, but for me, I choose guest only and limit the IP addresses in each CIFs share and allow network discovery with blank min and SMB3_00 as max in CIFS setup.

You might have a more fluid environment there.