It may be obvious, but its easy to forget; to access samba shares using ip6 you need to allow ip6 addresses access to the server. If you want to limit access to local ip6 addresses and you are using the "hosts allow" option in smb.conf then add the following address/masks to the end of any ip4 addresses you alread have listed fc00::/7 fe80::/64 ::1 this will allow link-local, unique-local, and local loop ip6 addresses Even if a machine has a public ip6 address, it will also have a link-local one for ip6 sublayer operations of the Neighbor Discovery Protocol as well as for some other protocols such as DHCPv6 if you are using a firewall, don't forget to allow access to port 5357 (tcp) and 3702 (udp) otherwise wsdd2 will not work.