I normally disable “Computer Browser” service in Windows by default because multiple computers having it on causes errors showing up in event log complaining there are multiple masters, and it’s not necessary for my simple home network because I’m just using a workgroup (no domain controller).

However, today I found out that even after setting up MX Linux’s Samba correctly (see below), if none of the computers on my windows network runs “Computer Browser”, my Windows computer name will not show up in “Thunar File Manager” although I can access it with smb://, and linux computers running Samba server shows up fine.

There’s also another twist to get the SMB client to work in Thunar File Manager. Despite smbtree works right out of the box (it detects the Windows shares), I’ll have to add this line in /etc/samba/smb.conf for the file manager to even probe the list of computers (not timeout):

name resolve order = bcast host

The point is to use broadcast lookup BEFORE dns lookup. DNS lookups for my local resources are often temperamental (could it be my router?), and I saw Linux Mint working with Windows briefly without these settings (editing smb.conf and also enabling “Computer Browser” service in Windows), but it failed today even after I re-installed MX Linux from scratch.

The other lines mentioned like client max protocol = NT1 and netbios name mentioned on the forums are not needed.

After configuring it. Restart smbd:

sudo /etc/init.d/smbd restart