Hello all,

I was setting up a simple samba server and having a hella time. I could see my server via windows machine, however I could not access. As it turns out ufw had no open ports except a few slurm ones I had setup while ago for a beowolf cluster. I opened port 445 and the 3 netbios(137,138,139) ports and everything worked great.

My question is: How did windows know my server name if all the netbios ports were blocked via ufw? seems like the server netbios name should have been completely invisible to windows. The host name for the server was different then the netbios name, but it was seeing the netbios name. I could get and verify the hostname from the website on my router and it was definitely different.

Thanks in advance....

Typically firewalls are configured to allow all outgoing traffic but block incoming traffic usually if it didn't originate from the computer itself.

One method of netbios name resolution is to broadcast the netbios name out on the network to announce I am here. Your windows computer will register the name and display it in the network window. However, when you click on the icon because your sending a new traffic message the firewall blocks it and you get an error.