Cannot connect Solaris 10 to Windows 7

Question

I'm trying to connect a Solaris VM (powered by VMware Player) to Windows Explorer in Windows 7. When I try to map the network drive I get the following:

The specified server cannot perform the requested operation.

I am using the URL below which has worked on a machine I used before. The only thing that has changed is the IP address of the Solaris machine. I am able to connect to the VM via PuTTY.

\\1.2.3.4\xxx\yyy

I checked and I think Samba is running:

root   375     1   0 09:53:39 ?           0:00 /usr/sfw/sbin/smbd -D
root   376   375   0 09:53:40 ?           0:00 /usr/sfw/sbin/smbd –D

Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

1. Check the firewall within the guest and make sure it is allowing the proper samba/nbd ports inbound.

2. Make sure you're actually running nmbd (I believe it's the companion NetBIOS service for Samba, which is required even if you aren't using the raw NetBIOS protocol... nowadays we use NetBIOS over IP, which is what nmbd is for.)

3. Make sure the host firewall (security software, built-in Windows firewall, etc) isn't interfering with the guest's attempts to host smbd and nmbd. If I had a nickle for every time a Windows firewall blocked someone trying to do something interesting with their PC, I could pay for the gulf oil spill cleanup.