Its not an entirely simple problem. You need to learn a little about microsofts workgroup vs homegroup
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... -to-finish
One can then use samba to join a homegroup or workgroup. But its still not great.
I like to set IP's static via my router on machines I want to access and within each computer, set shares and access those via IP's. Nemo has a nice gui for accessing windows servers. At work, IT sets those IP's then follow same. I found this post by tovian very helpful. I prefer the last option
Re: Linux Mint 18 access to Windows shares
Unread post by tovian » Sun Mar 25, 2018 10:51 am
Here's some things you can try to see if you can get more information that may lead you to either a fix or a better understanding.
1. Unplug the internet cable from your public-facing modem/router (to isolate yourself from the internet while testing).
-- turn your Windows firewall(s) OFF ( I would reboot all machines at this point just to make sure ALL networking components are reinitialized)
-- try your access from the Mint box again
-- make absolutely sure you turn your firewall(s) back ON before you re-connect the internet access
2. Change the workgroup value in your smb.conf to your other workgroup-id
-- again, I would reboot here to make sure this test is not corrupted by some previous (cached) setting/value
-- test your Windows access(es) again and compare with what you observed the original way
*- Windows doesn't care about most capitalizations so it shouldn't matter if you use upper/lower case in your smb.conf - but, just to eliminate any possible glitch, I would use exactly the same spelliing/format in ALL settings.
3. WORKAROUND - I abandoned attempts to browse Windows workgroups from Linux long ago. Instead I set static IP's for all my machines (on both my network segments). Then I can set non-changing references to all hosts (something like "places" or "favorites" depending on the file-manager I'm using). It's kind of a pain to set up initially, but it's so much smoother and more reliable in the long term. And, all your hosts stay "in the same place" no matter what system you are trying to reference them from. This is extremely useful for me when I connect a client computer to my lab network and need to get to other machines (repo's) to retrieve software.
But to mount a share on boot you may need to use the CIF protocol. It was split from samba and must be installed separately and on kernels which support cif (all ours should). Here's a tutorial that isn't too hard to follow. Fist do the above and set IP's for all devices then
https://markontech.com/linux/mount-a-ne ... -tutorial/
comadore, pcDOS, hpux, solaris, vms-vax ....blah blah blah..
Yet I'm still a fn nooob