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Samba weirdness in various file managers

This might be a bit long. Hang in there. I'm putting it here because I've a vague feeling it might be related to not having systemd running, but that's only a vague feeling, could be entirely unrelated?!!

For years I've been happily mounting samba shares using autofs with no problems. Everything worked fine. In fact everything still does work fine if I use a shell and not a gui filemanager. Read, write, copy, create, no problems, so the mount commands all look fine. But!!

Recently I moved from KDE + Dolphin back to XFCE + Thunar, which used to work fine with autofs mounts. Not so much this time.

The first problem in Thunar is that it doesn't recognize I have rw permissions for "a while", so for a few minutes I can't delete or create anything on the samba shares, then it realizes I do have permission and everything is ok. (Caja & pcmanfm for example don't seem to have this problem).

I know pcmanfm has this bug where if you drag (for example) contents from an archive manager and accidentally pass over the left "places" pane, the archive manager and pcmanfm both hang indefinitely. Which annoys me (has been reported but never fixed). So I'll try Caja to get around this first problem.

But the next problem exists in Thunar, Caja and pcmanfm. I can't copy a folder from the samba share and paste it in to my home folder anywhere. The copy progress meter pops up, but it stops at about 1MB. Cancelling it doesn't work. Nothing works. It just hangs as a stuck job until I reboot. So I tried changing from autofs to fstab based mounting, same problem. Hm. Weird. Command line copy / move / create all still work 100% perfectly.

However! If I mount the samba share using gvfs in Thunar, I can copy files again and it instantly realizes I have rw permission in the samba folders. Sadly I don't only use a file manager to do things, so I need autofs (or fstab) mounting to let various cleanup / backup scripts run. Also, even though there is no password to mount these samba shares, Thunar prompts me to enter as a guest every time I want to open the share, I didn't have this problem with autofs running.

This feels more like a general complaint about the state of file managers gradually deteriorating in Linux distros, but I was wondering if anyone else has noticed the same problems recently, or if they'd found a workaround.

Have a geeky xmas and thanks for reading.

Re: Samba weirdness in various file managers

Reply #1
under KDE + Plasma  works?

if it works well in command, it's not the 99.9999% samba error, but those programs (or gvfs - like this https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/50801?project=1&string=gvfs).

you can try smb4k for testing too. It's interesting....

 (i use no samba, so i can't help)

Re: Samba weirdness in various file managers

Reply #2
It seemed to work in KDE, but recently Dolphin got new bugs that made me decide to ditch the whoel KDE experience. I like what they are trying to do at KDE, but the constant tweaks / changes and new bugs finally got to me. (See: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420712 and https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430374 for example). So yes, it looks like a "gnome based filemanager" problem. spacefm can copy files with no problems, but I really don't like spacefm's features / layout.


Re: Samba weirdness in various file managers

Reply #4
There are often other machines here on windows that need to access the same shares, so "just delete samba lol" sadly isn't an option.

Re: Samba weirdness in various file managers

Reply #5
Well, after much mucking around, I discovered that setting the server samba version to allow "NT1" as the lowest protocol allows me to mount it with vers=1.0 option and files seem to copy ok again. I don't know yet if this will mess up the windows machines that try to connect (it might do). But for anyone trying to figure this out, I currently have:

server min protocol = NT1
client min protocol = NT1
client max protocol = SMB3

In the server smb.conf file, and I have to then use vers=1.0 as a mount option on the client machine.
This is new behaviour (has been working fine just set to SMB2 for well over a year).

Re: Samba weirdness in various file managers

Reply #6
@mogs, I'm using the same and I never got problem with Dolphin. My smb.conf is so setted:

Code: [Select]
# This option is important for security. It allows you to restrict
# connections to machines which are on your local network. The
# following example restricts access to two C class networks and
# the "loopback" interface. For more examples of the syntax see
# the smb.conf man page
   hosts allow = 192.168.0. 127.
   client min protocol = NT1
   server min protocol = NT1
   ntlm auth = ntlmv1-permitted
# if you want to automatically load your printer list rather
# than setting them up individually then you'll need this
   printcap name = /etc/printcap
   load printers = yes