Samba update breaks nautilus network browsing

[Boaz Arad]

Under hardy heron 8.04 (dev) updating smb-common and smbclient from 30.0.28a.0ubuntu to 30.0.28a.0ubuntu breaks nautilus network browsing. (network://)
Acsess using smb://computername or smbmount still works well.

[Mike Perrin (mperrin)]

I believe the problems I am experiencing with 8.04-beta live CD are related to this bug. My share server is a Trendnet TS-U200 flash card appliance with two shares configured; //fileshare/SD_MMC_c is public, //fileshare/CF_a requires a user name and password. These shares are working properly with 7.10 (live or installed).

My observations with 8.04 beta live (samba-common and smbclient version 3.0.28a-0ubuntu3) are:

Using the network browser, I can discover fileshare and see the SD_MMC_c and CF_a shares.

When I select the public share SD_MMC_c, the network browser hangs with a blank window but a network folder icon is created on the desktop. Double clicking the desktop icon opens a new file browser window with the share contents and also breaks the hang in the original window which now displays the contents also.

When I select the private share CF_a, I get a dialog window asking for username, domain and password. Although I fill these in correctly, I receive an error message "Unable to mount location - Failed to mount Windows share". I am also unable to connect to this share by using the Places -> Connect to Server dialog.

Using smbclient, I get these behaviors:

Connecting to the public share using
$ smbclient //fileshare/SD_MMC_c
is successful when just hitting [ENTER] at the password prompt.

Connecting to the private share using
$ smbclient //fileshare/CF_a --user=myname%mypassword
fails with the following messages:
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 2.2.8a]
Server requested LANMAN password (share-level security) but 'client use lanman auth' is disabled
tree connect failed: SUCCESS - 0

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Hi Mike,

The error you're experiencing is because Samba in Ubuntu 8.04 beta uses stronger defaults for password negotiation. It appears that the appliance you're connecting to is based on an old version of Samba that only supports weak password encryption, so you will need to add the line "client use lanman auth = yes" in /etc/samba/smb.conf, as suggested by the error message.

This is unrelated to the behavior described in Boaz's bug report.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Boaz,

Your bug report did not list actual version numbers for the samba packages that you have installed. Could you please provide this? In particular, please provide the version number of libsmbclient, which is the package that interfaces with nautilus.

I am also unable to reproduce this issue here. Places -> Network correctly shows me all of the machines in my workgroup, and "Windows Network" shows me all other visible workgroups. Is this problem consistently reproducible for you, or perhaps it was a transient issue immediately after your upgrade?

[Mike Perrin (mperrin)]

Steve,

Thanks, your suggestion fixed my problem connecting to the private share, although the correct syntax is "client lanman auth = yes". The bizarre behavior I reported when connecting through the network browser to the public share SD_MMC_c still exists, however.

I probably should have Read The Fine Man page for smb.conf before posting, but grepping for lanman in smb.conf on both 8.04 beta and Fedora 8 produced no result and I gave up prematurely.

May I suggest that the smb.conf file in the final version of 8.04 should at least contain the appropriate line, commented out, with explanatory notation such as:
# Older servers may not support the higher level of default security for
# password negotiation and may require uncommenting the following line.
; client lanman auth = yes

Adding those lines to smb.conf is not very helpful for live CD boot, however, since the command line would need to be uncommented each time it is started, presuming no persistence. And if the default were changed for live CD boot only, it would fail after installation. This may be a case of shooting ourselves in the foot. We want people to try Ubuntu, but when they do they may not be able to connect to existing Windows or samba shares. Their response is likely to be "doesn't work, I don't want to deal with it". This seems a classic example of technical correctness overcoming intelligent marketing.

Mike

[Boaz Arad (z-launchpad-boazarad-com)]

Steve, I seem to be currently unable to reproduce the behavior.
I will attempt to do so again when the release version of Hardy is out.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Since this bug has not been reported to be reproducible for several months, I'm closing it now as invalid.

Mike, the default for client lanman auth support has been changed in hardy to support weak authentication again for the time being.