Windows cannot access Samba server

Question

I have an Ubuntu server, wheatley, and I'm trying to set up Samba on it for personal use on my home network. The goal is to have a Windows 8.1 computer, GLaDOS, with a drive mapped to it.

I am new to Samba. I have it installed and I did some configuration to /etc/samba/smb.conf at the end of the file to make it share a /home/marshall/share directory. I can see the server listed in my network locations from GLaDOS but if I select wheatley I get this Windows error:

Windows cannot access \WHEATLEY Check the spelling of the name. Otherwise, there might be a problem with your network. To try to identify and resolve network problems, click Diagnose. Error code: 0x80070035 The network path was not found.

When I attempt to map the drive using either \wheatley\share or \192.168.100.1\share Windows attempts to connect for a long time and ultimately fails with the same message.

I can ping and SSH into wheatley from GLaDOS.

Please let me know what I have done wrong. Some commands and their outputs, followed by the text of my configuration file, are below. Thank you!

marshall@wheatley:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS
Release:        14.04
Codename:       trusty

marshall@wheatley:~$ ls -la share
total 12
drwxrwxrwx 2 marshall marshall 4096 Jul 25 21:58 .
drwxr-xr-x 8 marshall marshall 4096 Jul 25 21:51 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 marshall marshall    9 Jul 25 21:58 test.txt

marshall@wheatley:~$ sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf
--WHOLE MESS OF STUFF OMITTED--
[share]
comment = mpf
path = /home/marshall/share
browseable = yes
read only = no
guest ok = yes
writeable = yes

Solution

I resolved this problem. UFW (the firewall on the server) was blocking the ports used by Samba. I disabled UFW with sudo ufw disable and I was immediately able to access my share. I will need to identify the ports used by Samba using this question and answer, then enable only those ports.

Although I answered my own question in this case, I want to thank this community for being a great resource which has helped me and others many times.

Comments

[ajgringo619]

Enabling UFW for Samba is as simple as this: sudo ufw allow samba