nautilus-share broken with libpam-smbpass removed

[Linus]

Package libpam-smbpass is removed from 16.04 archives because of bug causing segfault.

This makes nautilus-share very confusing since you won't be able to access the shares if they are set with authentication.
Users might be stuck thinking file sharing simply doesn't work because of this.
Perhaps nautilus-share should have a dialog explaining that a samba password has to be set or have it only with guest access for shares unless the issue with libpam-smbpass is fixed and back in archive.

[Sam Webster (sam+-)]

This is still an issue in yesterday's build of 18.04

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Gilles Schintgen (shigi)]

Wow, this is a frustating issue! It took me hours to figure out, simply because I couldn't believe what most solutions for older Ubuntu releases told me: it's broken out of the box and I need to fiddle with samba internals.

Yes a simple "sudo smbpasswd -a myusername" is sufficient to make it work (with authenticated shares).
But there is no indication whatsoever in the GUI for this! It even proposes to install samba in the first place!

It unequivocally passes the message "This is a nice GUI and it takes care of this. No need to worry."

But the exact opposite is the case. IMHO this is worse than having no GUI. Without a GUI I know that I just have to do a quick google search and follow some instructions (set up samba...) and all is well in a few minutes or half an hour. At least it's straightforward.

I'm a seasoned Linux user, but the current GUI sent me in all the wrong directions. It actively suggests that it takes care of everything, so I thought it'd be highly counterproductive to get in its way and edit samba's configuration myself. (Too many cooks...)

I see that there are longstanding technical issues with the connection to PAM and those may be hard to fix. I totally accept that!

But please, please, at the very least add some tooltip or popup dialog or text label (or modify an existing one) that informs the user that he is expected to manually add a samba user&password!

[Gilles Schintgen (shigi)]

Forgot to mention: this is with Ubuntu 20.04. And since I upgraded my main system 14.04->16.04->18.04->20.04 I also confirmed the brokenness in a VM with a fresh 20.04 setup, just to convince myself that this issue actually happens out-of-the-box.

[erik flister (eflister)]

i just spent all day on this, thanks so much for confirming the details gilles!

sudo smbpasswd -a username worked perfectly. phew!

note the dup with https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus-share/+bug/1096661

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

> But please, please, at the very least add some tooltip or popup dialog or text label (or modify
> an existing one) that informs the user that he is expected to manually add a samba user&password!

Not only that, but the password needs to be kept in sync manually. If you change the linux password, then you will have to change the samba password too, with smbpasswd again. Unless you are fine keeping them separate.

There is an old mechanism in place to sync the linux password if the samba one is changed via the protocol (see "passwd program" and "passwd chat" in smb.conf(5)), it's almost like an expect script, prone to failures, and I haven't used it in years. Unsure if it's still working.