Samba server doesn't show up in Finder on Mac OS X Lion

Question

I've a Samba server running (version 3.5.8; Linux box), but after upgrading to Mac OS X Lion the Samba server doesn't show up in the "Shared" section in the Finder sidebar anymore. Regular Windows machines show up, so auto-discovery is working. Also I can manually connect to the server (using "Go" -> "Connect to Server" and there entering the server's name), so a connection is possible.

Has anyone got Samba working with Mac OS X Lion?

I noticed that my server and other Windows boxes have different icons. So I clicked on "All..." in the "Shared" section and it looks like this:

So, here "coppermine-int" is a Windows 7 box, "ite" is a Windows XP box, and "deepthouht" is the Samba server. I used Cmd+I on everyone and it turns out that the Windows boxes have "Kind: PC" but the Samba server has "Kind: Server". That's why they have different icons (and are handled differently, I guess), but this doesn't solve my problem.

Solution

Apple switched to their own implementation of samba in Lion, which doesn't like using Bonjour advertised services on port 139 instead preferring 445.

See this post for changes to make to avahi configuration.

Essentially, you will need to edit or create /etc/avahi/services/smb.service

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">

<service-group>
    <name replace-wildcards="yes">%h-SMB</name>
    <service>
        <type>_smb._tcp</type>
        <port>445</port>
    </service>
    <service>
         <type>_device-info._tcp</type>
         <port>0</port>
         <txt-record>model=Xserve</txt-record>
    </service>
</service-group>

Comments

[Sebastian Krysmanski]

That's not it. My server is called "deepthought", so there's no special character in it. In fact, I have a Windows box that's called "coppermine-int" and it shows up (see screenshot in the original post).

[Jonathan Komar]

Once I switch the port in the smb.conf file to 445 smb ports = 445 139, can I hide the actual samba share so that only Bonjour (avahi) is shown in Finder?