I followed steps recommended by JimKnopf in this post to re-install Samba and now it’s working again.
The issue was that I had commented out the line:
lock directory = /var/cache/samba
In smb-local.conf
I did that a few months ago because unless it was commented out smbstatus wasn’t giving me any information about my shares. But now with it un-commented again Samba is running and smbstatus IS giving me information about active shares… so I’m still a bit confused but things are working.
Cheers,
Flex