Servers & Self-Hosting
7 curated resources, easiest first.
A quick fix for a NAS share that Windows refuses to open: stale saved credentials. The answer deletes the NAS entries from Credential Manager and reconnects. One commenter says it fixed things in seconds, while another reports it did not work for them.
Microsoft's reference for checking and changing SMB protocol versions on clients and servers. It says SMBv1 has serious security flaws and is not installed by default in Windows 11 or Server 2019 and later, so old NAS boxes should be updated rather than re-enabling it. It also warns that SMB signing is required by default on Windows 11 24H2 and Server 2025, which can block connections to some third-party servers.
SambaWiki guide to running Samba on a Linux box that is not in a domain, with one guest share and one password-protected share. It covers creating smb.conf, Samba users, groups, share permissions with setgid, validating with testparm and testing with smbclient. Guest shares are flagged as a security risk, and recent Windows clients may refuse guest access over SMB2/3.
A thread about a legacy NAS that stopped mapping after the September 2025 Windows cumulative updates. The answer explains the client now rejects SMB1 negotiation, offers re-enabling the SMB1 client as a not-recommended workaround, and advises updating the NAS firmware to SMB2/3. A second reply says Microsoft has begun blocking even manual re-enabling, and the original poster's NAS had no newer firmware, so replacing it may be the only fix.
A Windows 11 client could not reach an SMB share and net view returned error 53. The most-endorsed answer adds the share's address and credentials to Windows Credential Manager so Windows authenticates correctly.
A 2017 community how-to that installs Proxmox VE, builds a RAIDZ2 ZFS pool, creates datasets, shares them with Samba and maps the share from Windows. It is dated (Proxmox 5, Ubuntu 16.04) and the examples use weak sample passwords and wide-open 0777 Samba masks, so tighten those. Pool creation and the installer can wipe disks, so double-check device IDs.
A thread about slow folder listings and Finder lockups on a TrueNAS SMB share from a Mac (file transfer speed itself was reported as fine). One answer replaces /etc/nsmb.conf with settings such as streams=yes and notify_off=yes and sets DSDontWriteNetworkStores to stop .DS_Store files on network shares; another suggests SMB Multichannel and the TrueNAS Apple-style character encoding option. Edit system config files carefully and note these are community tweaks, not Apple guidance.