I wanted to share files on my company’s Mac Mini with other Windows computers over SMB. The Mac clearly had “File Sharing” turned on, yet the Windows machines refused to see the machine, let alone the shared folders. After half a day of tinkering, I finally found the real culprit — with the help of a pile of command-line tools. This post records the whole troubleshooting process, and also gives a good rant about Windows’ junk-pile design that has only gotten messier from Win10 to Win11.