Question regarding home LAN (network discovery, master browser)

[boardlord]

Hi guys!

I hope someone can help me with this
Here is my setup:
Router: Netgear R7000 running Tomato
Network clients: 1 desktop with wired connection; 1 Intel NUC as HTPC with wired connection; 1 Synology NAS with wired connection; 1 laptop with wireless connection. All computers are running the latest Windows 10 version.

Here's what I did:
Disabled Homegroup, set the same Workgroup name on all clients (they are named simply, no special characters), disabled Computer Browser Service on all computers, set up Tomato as WINS server and Master Browser and supplied the Workgroup name. On the NAS I also set the Workgroup name, set the minimum SMB protocol to SMBv2.

Everything went fine, worked as it should, clients showed up on the network lighting fast after boot up.
The router showed up consistently as the Master Browser according to this small utility:
hxxps://scottiestech.info/2009/02/14/how-to-determine-the-master-browser-in-a-windows-workgroup/

After that I proceeded to disable SMBv1 on all computers according to this article:

hxxps://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2696547/how-to-enable-and-disable-smbv1,-smbv2,-and-smbv3-in-windows-vista,-windows-server-2008,-windows-7,-windows-server-2008-r2,-windows-8,-and-windows-server-2012

After rebooting again everything just to be safe, something went wrong the NAS didn't show up on the network, I had to manually navigate to it by \\"NAS NAME"

Any ideas what could be the problem? What additional information should I provide?

Thanks!

Edit: Forgot to add: IPv6 is disabled, all clients were assigned static IPs, and all of them are on the same subnet (192.168.2.xxx).

Edit2: the command "net view" returns error code 64. As soon as I re-enable SMBv1 according to the above article, the output of "net view" is normal.

 

[MichaelCG]

WINS in 2017? That is what DNS is for these days.

Have you checked with Synology to confirm their SMBv2 or SMBv3 support?

 

[MichaelCG]

Also to note, this may be were a proper PCAP of the traffic will be needed to see what the actual exchange is between your clients and your NAS. Within Wireshark, you should be able to see the various SMB flags to see what protocol/features each were trying to use and possibly what the return code was.

 

[boardlord]

WINS in 2017? That is what DNS is for these days.

Have you checked with Synology to confirm their SMBv2 or SMBv3 support?

Thanks for the tip, I'll look into discarding WINS for Tomato's internal DNS server. And as far as Synology's support, it explicitly supports SMB3.

Edit: good tip on Wireshark, will fire it up when I get home today!

 

[boardlord]

Thanks for the tip, I'll look into discarding WINS for Tomato's internal DNS server. And as far as Synology's support, it explicitly supports SMB3.

Edit: good tip on Wireshark, will fire it up when I get home today!

Ok, after looking at various resources and articles I realized that workgroups, network browsing DOES rely on SMB1. I know I could map a lot of the clients' shares as network drives, but I guess I'm just too used to network neighborhood and network browsing, so enabling SMB1 it is for me. I'll just harden up external access as good as I can... Thanks to MichaelCG in particular for taking the time to try to help me!

 

[MichaelCG]

You don't have to map the drive, but you can also just create a shortcut to the resource. In Win7+, you can also add the system as a favorite so it shows up in the top list in Explorer.

I have not gone through the effort to disable SMBv1 on my home network still....until recently, I still had older media devices (WDTV) which used it. I am actually not sure what Sonos is using....appears the rest of my day is now shot since I am going to go peruse the Sonos forums to see if I can find that answer. Other than Sonos, I don't think I have anything non Windows7 or higher accessing my shares (fileserver is a Win7 box).