Difficult to share external hard drives

[Sam Morris]

A user found it hard to share files on an external hard drive. Although it is not clear which package to file the bug against, I guess samba is a reasonable starting point.

The user wanted to share files on an external usb hard drive. nautilus-share made that part easy, except that when I tried to access the share, I got a not-very-helpful generic error message from nautilus.

So I tried to use smbclient directly, and got only NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME errors, even though 'smbclient -L' revealed the share existing normally.

After checking the samba log on the user's laptop it appeared that the shared path (/media/USB-DISK) did not exist! But it certainly did. Eventually I realised that the problem was that the 'nobody' user could not access /media/USB-DISK because hal's default policy is to mount disks so that they are only readable by the mounting user.

So the next step was to add the mount options 'fmask=111,dmask=000' to the volume, which was ok to do in nautilus, and then remount the disk. But I still got NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME errors on the client. I thought that maybe I would have to restart samba to persuade it to try and look in /media/USB-DISK again, but that didn't work--and then, the share disappeared from the output of smblcient -L entirely!

At this point I ran 'net usershare list' on the server and got the following output:

info_fn: file /var/lib/samba/usershares/blah is not a well formed usershare file.
info_fn: Error was Path not allowed.

Hm, not very clear. At this point I gave up and began to write this bug report.

Meanwhile, my user rebooted, and then examined the share properties in nautilus. Now, they got an error saying that the share would not work because 'usershare owner only' needed to be set to false. After changing the option and restarting samba, I was then able to access the share. Phew!

So I think there are a couple of different bugs here:

 1. Unclear error messages from samba if it is unable to access a shared directory
 2. No warning from nautilus-share if samba can't access a shared directory
 3. nautilus-share did not recognise that the situation had changed and did not present the useful message until the user had restarted

[Thierry Carrez (ttx)]

Like you said, there is a couple of different bugs in that user story.
Could you please file separate bugs with the exact scenario to reproduce them, including the error messages you got, and the expected behavior ? I'm closing this one since we can only fix bugs about specific issues and not a general difficulty.

Alternatively, you can submit a "Make it easier/more intuitive to share external hard drives" in Ubuntu Brainstorm if you think the feature is failing completely and must be redesigned.