Configuring Samba on Ubuntu 16.04 on two nearly identical machines

Question

I have two Ubuntu 16.04 machines that are nearly identically configured.

I have identical Ubuntu user names on both machines: Username: xyz

Assume I have two directories, /home/xyz, on both machines. I want to use the Linux program, Double Commander (great program!), to synchronize these two directories.

At the bottom of /etc/samba/smb.conf I have

[xyz]
path = /home/xyz
valid users = xyz
read only = no

I've also done

sudo smbpasswd -a xyz

on both machines.

When I run just one machine I can see /home/xyz on Windows 7 machines connected to my network. I have not tried running two machines because I didn't want to screw up my network.

Question 1: How do I access the network share in Ubuntu? Everything I have tried has failed.

Question 2: How do I set things up so that I have two network shares (one for each machine) so I can disambiguate them without having to create differently named users on each of the Ubuntu machines?

Question 3: What is the purpose of the [xyz] in /etc/samba/smb.conf

Answer 1

Answering my own Question 1:

For me it was a two step process:

some-very-long-name@some-very-long-name:~$ nmblookup some-very-long-
192.168.29.168 some-very-long-<00>
some-very-long-name@some-very-long-name:~$ sudo mount -v //192.168.29.168/some-very-long-name /mnt/ralph12 -o username=some-very-long-name,password=somePassword
mount: //192.168.29.168/some-very-long-name mounted on /mnt/ralph12.
some-very-long-name@some-very-long-name:~$

I had created an smb network share name called some-very-long-name. Note that nmblookup needs to have the name truncated to 15 characters.

Then use the ip address delivered by nmblookup in the mount command.