Ubuntu – Unable to open “Windows Network” to see other computers on LAN

networkingsambasharing

I have my machine connected to our office LAN which has many other machines that use win XP, win 7 etc. Until a month or so ago, I was able to share files and folders with them, but now I can't even see what machines are there on my LAN, let alone access their files. I tried accessing a machine by its name, by opening smb://machinename, but that says

Error: Failed to retrieve share list from server
Please select another viewer and try again.

I tried restarting samba with sudo service samba restart, but that says samba: unrecognized service, but then samba is shown as installed in synaptic.

I am pretty much stuck on this. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Best Answer

Basically you can try viewing network in nautilus with network:/// in nautilus location bar. As for restarting samba server I think try replacing samba in your service command with smb or smbd. Or try using machine ip rather than machine name.