smbd: make_connection_snum: canonicalize_connect_path failed for service SHARE

Samba is a free software re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol, and was originally developed by Andrew Tridgell. Samba provides file and print services for various Microsoft Windows clients and can integrate with a Microsoft Windows

One of our shares refused to work this morning, kept throwing an error saying:

Windows Cannot Access Share
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Looking at the message log file at /var/log/messages showed the following:

smbd:  make_connection_snum: canonicalize_connect_path failed for service share, path /PATH TO SHARE/share

There are a number of ways to approach this,

Make sure the folder has the execute bit enabled

chmod -R a+x /PATH TO SHARE/

Verify that the path of the shared folder on disk hasn’t changed

This was the culprit for us, the location of the folder on disk had changed which is why the share was throwing errors.