nautilus shows Windows Network but fails to open it

[Marius Gedminas]

1. Open Nautilus
2. Click 'Other Locations' in the sidebar
3. Click 'Windows Network'

Expectation:

- a list of local servers with Samba shares

Actual result:

- nothing happens for a while, then a popup saying "Could not get list of shares from the server: No such file or directory" (I'm translating back from lt_LT)

journalctl shows these errors:

    nautilus[8942]: Called "net usershare info" but it failed: Nepavyko paleisti antrinio proceso „net“ (Toks failas ar aplankas neegzistuoja)
    gvfsd[5799]: mkdir failed on directory /var/cache/samba: Permission denied
    gvfsd[5799]: dbus_mount_reply: Error from org.gtk.vfs.Mountable.mount(): Nepavyko iš serverio gauti viešinių sąrašo: Toks failas ar aplankas neegzistuoja

The samba-common package is not installed (nautilus Recommends gvfs-backends which Suggests samba-common).

It would be nice if Nautilus asked me to install samba-common via packagekit or something instead of just failing.

(Although just 'samba-common' appears to be insufficient; I still can't browse the Windows Network in Nautilus after I 'apt install samba-common'.)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.10
Package: nautilus 1:3.20.3-1ubuntu3.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.8.0-26.28-generic 4.8.0
Uname: Linux 4.8.0-26-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zcommon znvpair zavl
ApportVersion: 2.20.3-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Wed Nov 9 18:39:50 2016
GsettingsChanges: b'org.gnome.nautilus.window-state' b'geometry' b"'890x464+362+407'"
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-09-10 (60 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 16.04.1 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160720)
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to yakkety on 2016-10-15 (25 days ago)
usr_lib_nautilus: gnome-terminal 3.20.2-1ubuntu5

[Khurshid Alam (khurshid-alam)]

It requires samba to be installed along with all dependencies.

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

I've been unable to get network browsing to work even after installing samba and disabling the firewall. smbtree -N shows other servers and shares on the LAN, but Nautilus just shows the Opening... dialog without making any progress even after several minutes.

(Accessing smb://server/share in Nautilus, OTOH, works fine even without apt installing samba and without disabling the firewall. If you know the name of the server and the share.).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. Do you still get that issue? If so what's the output of "gio ls network:///" and "gio ls smb:///"?

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

Tried this again on Ubuntu 18.10, and I'm happy to report that almost everything works fine!

- "Other locations" in Nautilus shows my Samba server (after a couple of seconds)
- I can click on it, get an authentication dialog, then see the shares
- I can click on a share and see the files
- I can click on a file and discover that Totem is still hilariously broken on Wayland (that's a separate bug)

However some things are still broken:

- "Other locations" in Nautilus shows a "Windows network"
- I can click it and couple of seconds later I get an error dialog saying "Could not access location" (title): "Couldn't get a list of shares from server: No such file or directory" (translating from lt_LT again).

gio ls network:/// prints a usage message.

gio list network:/// shows

    dnssd-domain-VARLIUS2._smb._tcp
    smb-root

(VARLIUS2 is the name of my Samba server)

gio list smb:/// says

    gio: smb:///: Location is not a mountpoint

(I'm translating back from lt_LT because no amount of LC_ALL=C LANGUAGE=en is giving me English error messages, at best I get ?s instead of UTF-8 characters.)