Freshly installed Debian Squeeze a few days ago, and was also surprised that Samba isn't listening on the IPv4 address according to netstat. However, it doesn't appear to actually be breaking anything.
Minor changes to default smb.conf: [global] security=share [test] path = /srv/samba/test read only = no guest ok = yes force group = sambashare Baseline netstat after restarting Samba: $ netstat -ant Active Internet connections (servers and established) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 52 10.0.0.50:22 10.0.0.101:49164 ESTABLISHED tcp6 0 0 :::22 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 ::1:25 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 :::445 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 :::139 :::* LISTEN Browse from a Windows 7 PC, create a test file, and open it in Notepad: $ netstat -ant Active Internet connections (servers and established) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 10.0.0.50:22 10.0.0.101:49164 ESTABLISHED tcp6 0 0 :::22 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 ::1:25 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 :::445 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 :::139 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 10.0.0.50:139 10.0.0.101:49213 ESTABLISHED Browse from a Windows XP PC (no IPv6 support) and open that same test file in Notepad: $ netstat -ant Active Internet connections (servers and established) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 52 10.0.0.50:22 10.0.0.101:49164 ESTABLISHED tcp6 0 0 :::22 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 ::1:25 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 :::445 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 :::139 :::* LISTEN tcp6 0 0 10.0.0.50:139 10.0.0.102:1198 ESTABLISHED In short, netstat is just deceiving us for some reason - Samba is, indeed, listening and communicating using IPv4.
