Samba share will not connect (was working yesterday)

Question

I have a CentOS websver with a Samba share set up (\\webserver\websites).

I was connected to this share just yesterday without issue, but today my Windows 8 PC will not connect to it. I've also tried making a connection from Windows 7 and Windows XP, all without success.

I initially tried restarting my computer, but that did not work. I then tried restarting the Samba service on the webserver (service smb restart), and when that failed I restarted the webserver.

All of that was to no avail, and I still cannot connect to the share.

The webserver is contactable from my PC (and the others I tried), as the websites it hosts work fine and I'm able to Putty to the server.

When connected to the webserver, I can see that Samba is running by using service smb status -

service smb status
smbd (pid 4685) is running...
nmbd (pid 4688) is running...

Can anyone please help me to get this share working?

Here is my full Samba config (/etc/samba/smb.conf) -

[global]
        workgroup = MYGROUP

        server string = Samba Server %v

        log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m

        max log size = 50

        security = user
        encrypt passwords = yes

        socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
        local master = no

[websites]
        comment = Websites
        browseable = yes
        writable = yes
        path=/var/www/html/
        valid users = dgard

Answer 1

Success. This was a firewall problem. I'm not sure what caused it, but the firewall stopped allowing connections via port 445.

I checked on a backup of the server from a few nights ago and sure enough, an entry for port 445 from a certain IP range did exist in /etc/sysconfig/iptables. I restored that single file, and all is right with this very small part of the world.

I have no idea how or why that entry disappeared, but if I ever find out I will update this answer.