My home linux/Debian/buster machine has suddenly made samba 'shares' invisible to my Win7 virtual machine (running under kvm/qemu).
Using smbclient I get two different responses: smbclient -L localhost only gives the error-message response: Unable to initialize messaging context Connection to localhost failed (Error NT_STATUS_UNSUCCESSFUL) But if I given the IP address: smbclient -L 192.168.1.20 it asks for a password, then tells me about the shares: Unable to initialize messaging context Enter WORKGROUP\user's password: ...shares... server info workgroup info If I do the same thing on another computer (running Stretch), I don't get the messaging-context whining, and after entering my password get the information whether I've given it 'localhost' or the IP address as an argument. Unfortunately the sambas are a different version, so I don't think I can directly compare their configuration. In case you wonder, testparm's [global] output is: [global] bind interfaces only = Yes deadtime = 1440 dns proxy = No domain master = Yes interfaces = br0 eth0 127.0.0.0/8 keepalive = 5 log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m map to guest = Bad User max log size = 1000 name resolve order = wins lmhosts bcast obey pam restrictions = Yes pam password change = Yes panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d passwd chat = *Enter\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *Retype\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *password\supdated\ssuccessfully* . passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u server role = standalone server unix password sync = Yes username map = /etc/samba/username.map usershare allow guests = Yes wins server = 192.168.1.20 idmap config * : backend = tdb hosts allow = 192.168.0.0/16 127.0.0.1 hosts deny = ALL Any hints or pointers to the Fine Manual gratefully received! -Frank {AFAICR I hadn't changed smb.conf since when it had been working. And I've tried this with the firewall completely off}