In OS X Tiger, network shares provided with Samba (SMB) shares from my local NAS showed up in the Finder sidebar automagically.

However, since I switched to Leopard, available SMB shares did not appear before they weren’t connected (except the host was an active windows machine). I always had to manually connect to servers with Cmd+K — A step back compared to the ease of the one click it needed before.

Various researches throughout the MacRumors forums at least pointed out the fact that the SMB workgroup has to be set correctly under the WINS-tab in the OS X network settings, but this alone didn’t to the trick.

In order to make it work as expected you have to activate file sharing with SMB on the Mac side, even though you don’t have to share any folders on your OS X machine.

To activate SMB sharing under OS X Leopard, follow these simple steps:

1. Open System Preferences > Sharing.
2. Activate the checkbox for File Sharing.
3. Click the Options button in the File Sharing panel.
4. Make sure the checkbox Share files and folders using SMB is ticked.
5. Then restart your Mac or put it to sleep for a short time to make the changes take effect.
6. All your Samba shares should finally appear in the Finder again.

Marking the checkbox for a specific account is not necessary unless you want to connect to shares located on the OS X machine from a Windows client. This option apparently activates Microsoft-specific network services so the NetBIOS names of SMB shares are resolved.

What I’m still wondering is why the SMB shares generally show in lowercase.