I have found the problem. It's AppArmor. Any directory I want to share needs to be added to the usr.sbin.smbd AppArmor profile: I added the line: /home3/shareddocs/** lrwk, to the file: /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.smbd followed by the command: sudo apparmor_parser -r /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.smbd