I'm currently using samba3.0.24 ( and have tried 25): If I use a windows box to browse to my share by name it does not work. If I browse by ip it works fine. If I use samba2 the browse works fine. The netbios name I provide in the smb.conf is longer than the 15 char max. However in samba2 it used to truncate this. In Samba3 it appears to try to truncate, however it takes the first 16 characters and then it appears to append the server string to the end of the netbios name. You can see this under windows xp. To resolve my problem I had to truncate the netbios name in the smb.conf file to 15 chars. Anything above this will prvent you from browsing by name from windows. Seems like a bug to me. Samba2 handled this just fine. To duplicate just set your server string and netbios name. Make the netbios name longer than 15 characters. I used the following in my smb.conf to cause the problem. [global] workgroup = COMPANY4 server string = house-controller-5000-0019D1DF9BWW netbios name = 0019D1DF9BWW-house-controller-5000