@f0x I think the algos are *mostly* matching --- I dug through the smb.conf manual page and found its highest supported protocol (NT1), and configured the server to support it. That improved the situation from "cannot read from the server" to "your password is wrong."
Current suspicion is that the client is able to *contact* the server over resolving the DNS name to the IP, but that when it goes to *establish* the connection, it then falls back to the windows network name addressing thing, which I have no knowledge in configuring or testing
@f0x In both modern Mac OS and the linux methods I've used, they're more than happy to just follow the DNS name