It’s good to be back and blogging again about potential issues or tutorials when operating or deploying equipment. In this instance, Ubuntu 14.04 with Samba fails to load nmbd on startup (at least especially when using a statically assigned IP), preventing it from starting a NetBIOS Name Server advertising it’s hostname on the local network. There is a pretty easy solution/workaround for this however, so we’ll be brief.

You need to open up /etc/init/nmbd.conf in your preferred text editor (I’m a sucker for nano) and edit the line that says start on (local-filesystems and net-device-up IFACE!=lo) to make it say start on (started smbd). To reiterate, the first few lines of your /etc/init/nmbd.conf file should say the following:

description "NetBIOS name server"
author      "Steve Langasek <steve.langasek@ubuntu.com>"

start on (started smbd)
stop on runlevel [!2345]

This should allow nmbd to start on boot, allowing it to advertise it’s hostname and making it a lot easier to access SAMBA shares from Windows/OS X computers on the network.