Shares disappear from Nautilus weekly

[Gary V Deutschmann Sr]

Binary package hint: nautilus

About once a week at random, all shares both Windows and Ubuntu will disappear from the Nautilus Places/Network.
This is a HARDWIRED LAN, NOT WIRELESS by the way. using SAMBA not NFS.

We have made no changes of any kind to the computers. They work fine for about 3 or 4 days and Places/Network shows ALL of our shares with no problem.

Then they will just disappear from Places/Network!

However, if you go to Go/Location and type in the IP address of each machine, you can display the shares and mount them again and they work fine, just don't show in Places/Network is all.

Also, all the shares appear in smbtree using terminal.
And you can PING each machine no problem.

From any of the other 7 machines you can access the computer that is not showing the shares.
2 machines are Windows XP, 6 are Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy.

When Nautilus decides to act up, it's quite random, and can affect any machine, usually not all of the machines.
It's like, well today is Friday, I think I'll just kick back and pester the daylights out of the operator today and not let the shares show today.

Then tomorrow, not making a single change, shares start showing up again.

I've been working with others to resolve this issue for over 3 months now and NOBODY can find anything wrong with ANY of my configuration files or Networking. I didn't expect they would, since everything works fine. The only issue seems to be that at random, Nautilus just decides it's NOT going to show shares in Places Network that day!

One other thing, your BUG REPORTING TOOL in Nautilus does NOT WORK EITHER!
Takes you to a page that displays the following:

Lost something?

There’s no page with this address in Launchpad.

Check that you entered the address correctly.

I didn't enter the address, I clicked on the LINK that Collects the Information and sends it, then it sends you to a non-existent web page here at Launchpad.

Thanks

TTUL
Gary

[Tom (tom6)]

Grrr, that all sounds very annoying. Do you only switch the machines or the router off once a week? Is it something to do with rebooting the router before/after the machines?

[Tom (tom6)]

Sorry this is so long-winded and seems to lack direction. We'll get there.

Ok, now i've read your report it's a bigger network than i first assumed - sorry about that. Also the problem has been going on longer than i assumed and various people haven't been able to find the pattern or cause. All the more annoying for you, sorry about that too.

A few questions out of curiosity...
Is the server a Windows or Linux/Unix one? Can the server see the machines but the machines can't see the sever? (or is it the other way around?) Can the machines normally see each other and does that stop too? It's quite possible that these questions didn't vaguely cover what system you have set up but i'd be interested to know. At the moment i only know that you have 8 machines with 6 of them on Ubuntu. I don't even know if your system includes a server.

Note that Windows machines don't seem to realise they can't see a share that has just dropped out and happily keep the label on display even weeks after it's no longer accessible - double-clicking on it might show that it can't really read the folder it says is there. Quite a useful feature if the vanishing act was only temporary i guess.

When next the problem occurs on just one machine try opening a terminal window on it and login as root (type su and the root-password of course) then do:

cd /etc/init.d
Ls

actually that should be a little L. In there should be something called 'networking' or something very close to that. Type that in with --help just after it as in:

networking --help

Hopefully there should be an option to 'restart' or 'reboot' so try something like:

./networking restart

the ./ is important. The command should be exactly as i typed it but you may be using a package other than 'networking' and that may prefer the qualifier 'reboot' to the term 'restart' although personally i tend to think of 'reboot' as being switching the entire machine off and on again which should be completely unnecessary.

It should be the same command for all your Ubuntu machines as i guess they were all setup the same, presumably at about the same time?

[Tom (tom6)]

OK, the server i'm connected through is a Windows one and goes a bit crazy sometimes after which i sometimes need to follow the instructions in the attached png picture.

Good luck :)

[Tom (tom6)]

More info please

Do you have a central server?
If so which OS; Window, Linux or other?

Does the temporary fix work?
  Open a terminal window
  su
  <your password>
  cd /etc/init.d
  ./networking restart
At that point can the machine suddenly see the rest of the network again?

Also can i confirm that only 1 machine at a time may suddenly start 'playing up' by not being able to access the network or ping or anything but that while it's playing up Windows and Linux machines are still able to access data on the machine? (or does Windows just pretend to be able to see it but gives an error message when you actually try to access shared data on it?)

Also confirming that all the Ubuntu machines suffer from this at some point or other with no discernible pattern.

Aside from that all i can suggest is unlikely to help but ;-
1. Pick a problematic machine at random and ensure the cables & wires are firmly in place and not worn bare somewhere the user might brush against. Check the network card is firmly in its slot (if the side panel comes off easily).
2. Upgrade a machine at random to Ubuntu 8.10, or wait 3 months to try with 9.04. A dual-boot choice with 8.04 and 8.10 might be less worrying to setup. Actually i've always had more joy with 8.04 so i seriously doubt this is the cause.

The bug-reporting tool should be working properly again now. It was glitchy for a few hours on the day you posted, classic timing - i've never known that to happen before.

Good luck and hopefully a happy new year
Regards from
Tom

[Gary V Deutschmann Sr (classichauslimited)]

Hi Tom

Sorry it took so long to get back to you!

Without listing each of the machines I have here. Other than 5 are running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 32 bit, 1 is running Ubuntu Hardy 64 bit, 1 is XP-Home and 1 is XP-Pro, I also have a machine that is not part of the LAN except for a quick connection to the internet, it's used for accounting only and has XP-Pro-MCE.

No matter how qwerky the Ubuntu machines are acting, both DOZE machines can always access ALL of the Ubuntu Machines. And yes I've actually opened files, not just relied on the mount showing, as I know they never disappear in the Doze.

I DO NOT run what you consider a File Server, However, rather than hitting each machine for the files, I have finally combined ALL the Data from ALL the machines onto one computers hard drives and we call this a Data File Server. It has an internal EXT3 500 gig, rsynced to an external USB local NTFS 500 gig, and for redundancy we have an off-site 500 gig also NTFS that copies from the external USB NTFS.

By doing it this, we only have to remember ONE IP number to enter in Go/Location when Nautilus is being it's nasty self. However, we still need to access the single shared folder placed on each computer quite often between each other during the day.

I've mixed and matched and moved computers around quite a bit lately. Having a couple die on us and replacing them on a seniority type basis, arithmetic shift left, hi hi. I didn't get the new one last time, being nice to a long time employee, let them have it. But you know how that goes, when something new comes in, they all get past down one step.

I did have an IT guy (who is really only familiar with Red Hat) over that has done a lot of work with Samba and he checked all of my configuration files, smb user files, networking, etc. and he could find nothing wrong.

Whether Places/Network is showing the shares or not, all of the following work correctly:
#1 smbtree will show each and every share. (NOTE: if smbfs is installed some are missing, so we don't have smbfs installed on any machine).
#2 we can ping each and every machine under 0.15 in most cases.
#3 we can in Network Tools where ping is located, use Traceroute and selecting each IP number it will show 1 HOP, the name of the originating machine and the name of the machine associated with the IP number we entered in 0.5 to 0.6ms for the machine we were looking at 0.2ms on the machine doing the looking.
#4 when shares do NOT show in Places/Network, we CAN go to Go/Location and type in the IP address of the machine, eg: smb://192.168.1.100 and it will open each shared folder on that machine, including the printer or other devices that are shared just fine and we can then Click on the folder in the Nautilus window. When we do this, the Share we selected will MOUNT and appear on the Desktop until we select it and unmount it, or reboot.

Without changing ANYTHING at all! If Places/Network was working for a couple of days just fine, it would just stop showing the shares. Sometimes this lasts for a couple of hours, sometimes for a few days. We ALWAYS select Places/Network in order to get TO the Go/Location bar.

Another oddity about Nautilu...

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

I don't think any of the issues here have anything to do with a bug in NetworkManager or any other piece of software, but I'm willing to play along. :)

If you can still reproduce this issue (I assume you would, no matter the release of Ubuntu being used); can you tell me what happens to the IP address for the Ubuntu machines? You'll likely notice IP changes logged in /var/log/syslog. I feel the most likely cause of what you're seeing is that the shares stop showing because the local IP changed, which breaks the connection that was established to have the shares show up in Nautilus.

Regardless of whether this is indeed the cause or not, the most useful piece of information here would be to get /var/log/syslog (and possibly /var/log/syslog.1) containing every log entry that happened between the shares properly appearing, and then not showing up on (a) later day(s).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for network-manager (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]