Phantom Network icons

Another OCD related post, which I apologize for in advance…

When my Umbrel is on in my mostly Mac household I frequently see generic icons in my Mac Network finder for other Macs on my network under their NETBIOS network name. Right now the kids are off at college, so only mine and my wife’s Macs are home. This is what I see…

The MacBook Pro-c8fb is my wife’s (Susan). Do I have to disable NetBIOS somewhere on the Umbrel to get these phantom images to stop showing up? With the Umbrel (Baby-Jeezus) off I only see the native Mac icons, so I know it’s the Umbrel that is causing these network broadcasts.

In Umbrel … do you have Share over network turned on in files?

Yes, although only to do Time Machine backups… which has been broken ever since 1.5.

A quick google produced a Gemini response that suggested turning off Netbios (nmbd) via the Umbrel terminal.

  1. Stop the NMBD Service: The NetBIOS name service is usually handled by nmbd. Stop it temporarily:
    sudo systemctl stop nmbd

  2. Disable the Service Permanently: Prevent it from starting on boot:
    sudo systemctl disable nmbd

I tried that and will update whether or not that worked longterm.

Update: these terminal commands seems to have fixed it.

1 Like

Correction… not fixed. Anyone have any ideas?