New to Ubuntu - Samba & Java

Hi,

I have been ruing Ubuntu (16.04) for a few weeks now and so far; it seems to be a good replacement for personal use and work use on occasion. However, I have a few questions:

1) What is the best way to access a samba share (NAS) or should I set my NAS to have an nfs share?
I have tried to use the "coect to server" option through the file browser and specify the server IP like follows; smb://<ip address here> but this does not seem to work or retu any sort of feedback. I understand that there are a few ways I can mount a share via the terminal but I have seen a lot of different information but all on older releases.

2) I have installed NetExtender & Java but how can I ensure that Java is kept up to date as well as NetExtender?
Will I get these updates automatically?

Hope this is the right place to ask these questions - if not please let me know!