Samba Error: The file or folder … does not exist

I had been having a strange problem with Samba, where creating shares through KDE created shares that are visible through SMB or Windows clients, yet opening them only showed an error that “The file or folder does not exist”.

There are two fixes for this problem:

Firstly, if you remove the line “msdfs proxy = no” from each share in smb.conf (usually found in /etc/samba/) , it seems to work – however you will have to remove this line every time you create a share, which is hardly ideal.

The second solution (and preferred one) is to turn off msfds hosting. The simplest way to do this in KDE is browse to:

kControl Center -> Internet & Network -> Samba -> Advanced Tab -> VFS

And uncheck “Host msdfs”.

Or if you are not using KDE, edit your smb.conf with your text editor of choice, and change the line “host msdfs = yes” to “host msdfs = no”, or just add the line “host msdfs = no” if there isnt a line referring to msdfs hosting.