Making Samba Shares Browseable Across Computers and in Finder

I've been working on my new ethernet/wifi combo network setup at home, and i've recently decided to set up shared folders and a backup server hosted on a Raspberry Pi. I was able to configure Samba on each of the devices, ping each other from the terminal and mount drives across the network. One thing I really wanted to enable was making the shares browseable in the network menu of Ubuntu and in Mac's Finder. It turns out there was one simple setting I was missing.

According to the docs for Samba, the simplest way to enable this feature is to designate a WINS server which catalogs and broadcasts share information for all devices in a workgroup. First make sure each device is part of the same WINS WORKGROUP. Then, designate ONE device as the WINS server. I chose my Raspberry Pi backup server. Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and include this line (or uncomment the existing line in the file):

domain master = yes

Again, make sure only one device has this line added to /etc/samba/smb.conf

Here are my global settings on the Pi:

[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
domain master = yes
server string = %h
wins support = no
dns proxy = no
security = share
encrypt passwords = yes
panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d



It's been a while since I posted, and we just moved into the new house last week, so I wanted to share a few pics from our walk around the neighborhood tonight. Enjoy!