How do I make my NSA310 visible in Windows File Explorer?

SteveG

Hi again and thanks for your message.

I hadn't rebooted either my Win 10 PC or NSA310 since starting work on this problem.

I executed ps and the result suggested samba was running.

I rebooted the Win 10 PC and tried again to navigate to my shares. Got the same Windows meassage "Windows cannot access \\NSA310\***".

Powered NSA310 and Win 10 PC off.

Powered NSA310 on and allowed it to settle down.

Powered on Win 10 PC and tried again to navigate to my shares. Got the same result. It didn't matter which share I tried:

So, even though the NAS shows the shares it couldn't access them.

I logged into the NAS with my browser and the Sharing/Shares tab shows the shares there is it used to:

Used WinSCP to login and navigate to /home/shares/ but nothing appears to be in there:

Used Windows Terminal to login and entered ps:

Out of curiosity I used my Win 11 PC File Explorer and tried \\NSA310. It gave me the same Windows message "Windows cannot access \\NSA310\***".

Then I tried \\SOHONAS to try and access my other Zyxel NSA310 NAS. Lo and behold I could navigate into the share and see my data.

I don't know whether I should be happy or not now. I can at least access my SOHONAS NAS with my Win 11 PC (which was the original problem) but I appear to have lost access to the shares on my NSA310 NAS.

Mijzelf

OK, recapitulate: You enabled smb1 on W11, but was not able to 'see' the server, but now it appears you can access SOHONAS by name. But you can't access NSA310 (and not see it either).

Your W10 can see and access SOHONAS, and can see but not access NSA310.

That W10 can see NSA310 and its shares shows that something is working on the NSA310, right? I am inclined to think that the inability to access it has something to do with cached credentials. W10 should have shown a login box when you tried to open that share, but it didn't. So it was trying to reuse a previous login, I suppose. Unless your username in Windows is also 'admin'.

Are you using complex passwords? (diacritics, emoji's, non-ascii characters) The firmware stores hashes of the samba passwords in /etc/samba/smbpasswd, which is used by both firmware samba and Entware-ng samba. In theory the same password would always yield the same hash, but I don't know if both samba versions use the same encoding for non-ascii characters in the passwords. That might give problems.

Used WinSCP to login and navigate to /home/shares/

You can find the shares in /i-data/<some-hex-code>/. (And connected USB disks can be found in /e-data/)

zyxel-samba-replacement can easily be reverted. Just run /opt/etc/init.d/S09ZyXELSambaReplacement stop and the firmware samba should be running again. Can you then access it?

SteveG

Heres a screenshot of the file explorer on my Win 10 PC (Gigabyte1):

As you can see, both PCs and both NASs appear in the right hand window under Computer. The two NAS Twonky media services also appear under Media Devices.

On my Win 11 PC (MSI) the two NASs do not appear under Computer but theTwonky services do appear under Media Devices.

In the left hand window under Network you can see the shares under SOHONAS. These are all as they have always been. The admin and Volume1 folders are not accessible from File Explorer. I get a prompt for my network credentials if I try to access them, but I don't get access even with my admin+password. music, photo, public and video folders were created by the NAS system, not me. I can access them but don't use them. All my data is located in gazes, which is the only share I created.

NSA310 used to be identical until I started working on it over the last few days to update Samba. Again, the only share I created and used was gazes and admin was inaccessible. I never tried to expand Volume1 … until today. When I said this morning that I could not access my shares, I had only tried admin and gazes. However, when I checked again later I found music, photo, public and video empty, as expected, but not inaccessible. To my surprise, when I clicked on Volume1 it expanded to show the share folder names again. music, photo, public and video are accessible but empty. admin contains the folders download, zyfw and zy-pkgs. gazes contains my data. I don't know how it got there, I always used to access the gazes folder one level up.

My Win 11 PC is now seeing the two NASs the same way the Win 10 PCs do … except that they do not appear under Computers in the Win 11 File Explorer. They used to until the 24H2 update on Win 11 and that was the problem I was trying to solve by updating Samba.

At this point I'm happy (relieved) that I can use the \\NSA310 and \\SOHONAS in the Win 11 File Explorer to gain access to my data on both NASs and transfer files, even if the folder structure isn't identical. I wish I had known/remembered this several days ago. It would have saved me a lot of frustration and time. Still, I learned a few things along the way.

A BIG thanks for your time and help.

Mijzelf

I had only tried admin and gazes. However, when I checked again later I found music, photo, public and video empty, as expected, but not inaccessible. To my surprise, when I clicked on Volume1 it expanded to show the share folder names

That proves it's a credential caching problem. Volume1 has the same access control as admin. But you never used it, so it's credentials were never cached.

BTW, The share Volume1 contains the whole volume. And inside you can find the folders which are also shares. So \\NAS\Volume1\gazes is the same folder as \\NAS\gazes, only shared in a different way. The purpose of this share is to be able to move files quickly between shares. When moving a file within a share, it's only administrative, but when moving between 2 shares the file has to be downloaded and uploaded, as there is no way to the client can know the files are on the same volume.

A BIG thanks for your time and help.

You're welcome.