How do I make Samba discoverable on a "Dumb AP"?

Installing and Using OpenWrt Network and Wireless Configuration
1

I followed the Configuration via LuCI section of the Wi-Fi Extender/Repeater with Bridged AP over Ethernet guide.

Then, I tried setting up a USB hard drive as network share with Samba on the "dumb AP". I was able to mount the share manually (with mount + the IP address of the dumb AP), but the share was not visible on the "network" section of two clients -- Nemo on a Linux Mint laptop and Finder on a Macbook Pro.

From what I'm gathered and based on my best guesses and assumptions, I feel like this could be due to one of the following:

  • some misconfiguration of the Samba config (pretty sure I tried lots of different config options related to this, but nothing seemed to work)
  • maybe something to do with the fact that the USB drive is connected to a "dumb AP", so something to do with DNS/DHCP
  • some misconfiguration of how my clients "see" Samba shares on my network

How might I troubleshoot this particular issue? I'd also be open to doing this with an NFS if that would make life easier. I'd like to make this "easy" for other folks in my home to access the share (hence asking about access via a GUI file browser and not setting up mounts with the terminal).

2

Been a while since I setup samba but is avahi-daemon needed to announce?

EDIT: if you have an option to use NFS I recommend ditching samba4 in favor of NFS due to the lightweight nature and ease of setup.

For reference, here is my /etc/config/samba4 for you to see.

config samba
	option workgroup 'WORKGROUP'
	option charset 'UTF-8'
	option interface 'lan'
	option description 'serenity'
	option macos '1'

config sambashare
	option read_only 'no'
	option create_mask '0600'
	option dir_mask '0700'
	option timemachine '1'
	option guest_ok 'no'
	option force_root '1'
	option name 'serenity'
	option path '/mnt/data/timemachine'
	option users 'jill`

config sambashare
	option path '/mnt/data/share'
	option read_only 'no'
	option force_root '1'
	option users 'jacq'
	option create_mask '0666'
	option dir_mask '0777'
	option guest_ok 'yes'
	option name 'share'

The only reason I am using samba4 is for iOS to use it as a timemachine vault.

3

Modern CIFS is DNS based, it doesn't need WINS anymore, nor zeroconf/ avahi/ mDNS, etc.

4

there is a little trick to this
you need the service "wsdd2"
but the network it's on needs to be call LAN
what device are you setting up ?