Connect Vista to OSX samba share

Today I had a bit of trouble getting my Vista machine to connect to a samba share on my macbook despite the mac being able to connect the other way just fine. The solution took a fair bit of googling as well as trial and error so I’m posting it here for future reference and others with the same issue.

Firstly make sure smb sharing is enabled on the mac – that’s in System Preferences -> Sharing. In the Options dialog tick Share files and folders using SMB. At this point I’m not sure whether to  edit /var/db/smb.conf or /etc/smb.conf, I found the former from googling and so edited that. Make sure the workgroup is configured the same as the Vista machine and add these lines.

client lanman auth = no
client ntlmv2 auth = yes

Save the file then run these commands from the terminal to restart the daemons

sudo launchctl stop org.samba.smbd
sudo launchctl stop org.samba.nmbd
sudo launchctl start org.samba.nmbd
sudo launchctl start org.samba.smbd

After that, the mac appeared in my network on the Vista machine but I still wasn’t able to connect until I finally realised that the logon box requires the computer name as well as the user name. Enter [Machine Name]\[username] rather than just [username] otherwise it seems to default to the name of the machine you’re logging on from.

Happy Days!

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