Nautilus cannot browse SMB

[JonR]

I am trying to configure Samba on the FC1 boxes on my mixed WinXP FC1 network. I have a couple of XP boxes which share directory trees as well as two FC1 Samba Server boxes.

I've got a few problems I'm trying to work through but I'm trying to take it one at a time... The current question is:

I can connect to my main FC1 server from any other box ok, but... I can't connect to the XP shares using Nautilus on the main FC1 Samba Server box. (The other FC1 Samba Server connects to the XP shares fine.)

I've tried smbclient in the cli on the main FC1 Samba Server and using "$ smbclient //XPBox/Sharename" I can connect to an XP share ok. It looks like SMB is working ok but Nautilus seems to think otherwise.

When I type SMB: or SMB:/// in the address box in Nautilus all I get is a failure message "Couldn't display "smb:///", because Nautilus cannot contact the SMB master browser. Check that an SMB server is running on the network".


Anybody got any ideas where to look next?

[micha]

Have you tried to use other software like smb4k, LinNeighborhood,... to see if the problem comes from Nautilus or not ?

[JonR]

Originally posted by micha
Have you tried to use other software like smb4k, LinNeighborhood,... to see if the problem comes from Nautilus or not ?

Tried to load LinNeighbourhood today but can't get it to run. Window briefly appears and then just as quickly vanishes. Tried running it in a terminal as well - no joy.

Doesn't the fact that I can see other smb servers with smbclient suggest that it is more likely to do with Nautilus than not?

[micha]

Originally posted by JonR
Doesn't the fact that I can see other smb servers with smbclient suggest that it is more likely to do with Nautilus than not?

It does to me. You can try other software like komba, gnomba, xfsamba, xsmbrowser...

[mictubis]

You need to define your samba server as the master server. Sounds simple enough but it took me a few days of message board searching to find this solution when I had that problem.

Add these lines to the global section of your /etc/samba/smb.conf file and restart samba:

---8<---SNIP---8<---

os level = 200
preferred master = True
domain master = True
wins support = Yes
local master = Yes

---8<--- SNIP ---8<---

You should be good to go after that.

This will also take care any problems with the samba server randomly disappearing from your workgroup on the Windows side. You may not have seen it yet, but it happens and is quite annoying.

If in the future you decide to have more than one samba server on your network you can adjust which one is the 'master server' by adjusting the os level on each box to a number in the range 0 -> 200, with 200 being the strongest. If your 200 level os is offline for any reason then the next one down will take over as the master until it comes back.

[Igoraus]

type in nautilus

smb://computername/sherename/

nautilus will prompt you for username,domename and password

In FC2 is so

[JonR]

All I get with this is the Nautilus window hanging up and eventually crashing with a segmentation fault.

I'm not getting very far with this...

[satovey]

Originally Posted by JonR

All I get with this is the Nautilus window hanging up and eventually crashing with a segmentation fault.

I'm not getting very far with this...

I have this same problem.
If I log in as root, I can connect to the samba shares on my Mitel SME server.
If I log in as username, I have the same problems as you do. Is it possible that
Nautilus has some permissions that need to be modified in order for username
to connect to other servers?

Scott

[JonR]

I'm no longer running FC1 and since figuring out how to get Samba set up with FC2 have had few problems with it other than being unable to browse smb with nautilus which, I'm told is broken with gnome 2.6.

[satovey]

Originally Posted by JonR

I'm no longer running FC1 and since figuring out how to get Samba set up with FC2 have had few problems with it other than being unable to browse smb with nautilus which, I'm told is broken with gnome 2.6.

I found this Samba Tutorial in the howto section:
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2556
I done this and I can view the files using Nautilus.
Here's a hint that is not told though.
If you want to make it easier to get to
the files on your server, create a simlink
in the user directory to the /mnt/share.
This shortens the amount of directories you need
to go through to get to the server files.

I also found that I was able to edit the files using
gedit and openoffice without any trouble.

Take care.
Scott

[bryancole]

My experience (and there may be many problems with smb-browsing other than the ones I've encountered) is that nautilus (gnome-vfs actually) does not perform user authentication for *browsing* when a non-samba (i.e. M$-Win server) machine is the domain controller. However, it *does* do the correct authentication to actually connect to a share. Thus, I can read&write to shares by typing smb://hostname/sharename directly into the location box (or using the Connect To Server nautilus feature) and nautilus asks for the username and password in the expected manner.

If, instead, I want to browse the available hosts on the network, this also works OK, but when I come to list the available shares on any one Windows PC, I get a permission-denied error. The basic samba client works fine however with "smbclient -L //hostname".

This is still broken in gnome-2.8 AFAIK. Maybe they'll fix smb-authentication in gnome-vfs in time for gnome-2.10 & FC4. Here's hoping...

[satovey]

Ah,

That explains some of the problems I was having using
connect to server. It didn't work even though I was
connecting to another linux server running samba.
I'm moving away from MS Windows so as long as
it works and does what I need it to do, I am ok.

Just so you know, it wouldn't show the server
in my network either, I got the same error
message that you get when trying to view
all of the machines on the network. So this
is a bug that is not specifically MS related.

Scott