Session request failed (131,129) with myname=HOBBES destname=CALVIN Not listening for calling name If you get this when talking to a Samba box then it means that your global "hosts allow" or "hosts deny" settings are causing the Samba server to refuse the connection. Look carefully at your "hosts allow" and "hosts deny" lines in the global section of smb.conf. It can also be a problem with reverse DNS lookups not functioning correctly, leading to the remote host identity not being able to be confirmed, but that is less likely. System error 1240 means that the client is refusing to talk to a non-encrypting server. Microsoft changed WinNT in service pack 3 to refuse to connect to servers that do not support SMB password encryption. There are two main solutions: enable SMB password encryption in Samba. See the encryption part of the samba HOWTO Collection disable this new behaviour in NT. See the section about Windows NT in the chapter "Portability" of the samba HOWTO collection When getting the list of shares available on a host using the command smbclient -N -L the program always prompts for the password if the server is a Samba server. It also ignores the "-N" argument when querying some (but not all) of our NT servers. No, it does not ignore -N, it is just that your server rejected the null password in the connection, so smbclient prompts for a password to try again. To get the behaviour that you probably want use smbclient -L host -U% This will set both the username and password to null, which is an anonymous login for SMB. Using -N would only set the password to null, and this is not accepted as an anonymous login for most SMB servers.