Hello!

I am having strange experience with my firewall and networking.

If I have the DNS port open, "smbtree" or KDE smb:// cannot find any of the shares. However, I can connect to my SMB shares directly with smbmount. Apparently there is some conflict there. Does anyone know how to solve it?

any help would be great,
Murdock

It may have to do with how these processes are accomplishing name resolution.
smbtree and smb:// may be using DNS first. If that fails, they then resort to using a broadcast to reslove the smb name. With the DNS port open, they may be able to contact the DNS server which returns a negative response. With the DNS port closed, the DNS server cannot be reached so they attempt a broadcast. A negative response from a DNS server is different than not being able to contact the DNS server.
smbmount may be using a broadcast all of the time therefore the availability of the DNS server has no affect on it.

There are files on the Linux machine where you can configure which name resolution method is attempted first but it escapes me right now. I don't have a Linux machine here to look at. It may be nfswitch or hosts.conf or something like that. I also beleive there are settings you can make in smb.conf to designate the order smbmount uses for name resolution.

I hope this at least helps point you in the right direction.