I have a VPS set up as a storage server and a seedbox, running SAMBA and a PPTP VPN server, running Ubuntu server LTS 16.04. My goal is to be able to mount the shares add a network drive on my windows 10 computer, through the VPN. However, I can't access the shares, even though I can ping the server from my PC and access the other services running (SSH works, as well as Deluged for example), but the server doesn't show up in Network in the file explorer.
The virtual adapter on Windows is set up to perform split tunnelling, but I don't think that's where the problem is coming from. The basic configuration of Samba seems to be fine too, since I can access the share using AndSMB on Android while my phone is connected to the VPN. This leads me to think that the problem has to do with the network discovery mechanism of Windows, but I'm not sure how to fix this issue since I'm not very familiar with NetBIOS and WINS. I've tried enabling "WINS Support" in the Samba config file, but it doesn't seem to help by itself.
Should I just give up on PPTP and switch to a more reliable VPN technology (L2TP or IPSec)? I'm using PPTP for the low CPU usage and ease of installation, and I don't particularly care about security since I'm using the server to store publicly available files only as far as unencrypted data goes.
Thank you in advance for your help!
samba: Installed: 2:4.3.11+dfsg-0ubuntu0.16.04.7