I was curious how I could go about setting up SAMBA so that shares could be seen and used across different subnets. We have some Linux devices that are bound to Active Directory and we would like to have them serve SAMBA shares to clients that will reside in a different subnet than what the servers reside in? Is there any way to do this without needing to setup a WINS server or use legacy NetBIOS methods since the majority of our clients are Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Macintosh OS X (10.6 or newer)?
EDIT
Right now, only clients in the same subnet as the SAMBA server can see the shares. Clients outside of the subnet (i.e. the client subnet) cannot see or connect to the share.
The error returned is: The specified network name is no longer available. It does not seem to matter if I use IP, FQDN, or NetBIOS name to try and connect to the share with.
We have a common Cisco router handling the inter-subnet routing. Everything else seems to work correctly with this network setup and the device can be pinged from multiple subnets. I also do not believe it to be a firewall type of issue since the rules for this segment are rather lax.
Best Answer
Daniel of QNAP Taiwan helped me with this problem, and it turns out that it has to do with the workstation requiring signing of CIFS communications, which the QNAP does not yet do.
If you turn this registry key off (to zero) on the workstation in the other subnet, it will allow CIFS communications to the QNAP.
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters\RequireSecuritySignature
I forget the exact error code we were getting on our Windows 7 workstations in the other subnet, but it was an obscure and meaninglessly generic error message, different from "The specified network name is no longer available." However, the symptoms are the same: systems on the same subnet as the QNAP work fine, systems on other subnets fail.
QNAP says that they will likely address this registry key setting by setting up the QNAP to sign its CIFS communications, but there is no estimate for delivery.