GVFS/Nautilus won't list or connect to samba shares

[Steve Melvin]

Binary package hint: gvfs

I am using Ubuntu 8.04 with packages up to date.

My problem WAS that nautilus would list my Samba and Windows hosts, but when I clicked on them I wouldn't get any shares. I could use smbclient just fine, but gvfs-ls would timeout when trying to list samba shares, ie gvfs-ls smb://MASTER/core .

I fired up wireshark and noticed that whenever I used gvfs-ls smb:// that it sends out a DNS request to my ISP and gets back a successful lookup (wtf?) to 64.158.56.56. I use CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS and they resolve all bad lookups to their "helpful" search page, which explains why I get the timeouts.

I went to my /etc/samba/smb.conf file and uncommented and changed this line:

name resolve order = lmhosts host wins bcast
to
name resolve order = lmhosts wins bcast host

rebooted, and GVFS and Nautilus (as well as all GVFS enabled apps) were working like a dream.

[Collin Stocks (collinstocks)]

I had the exact same problem, and now it works like a dream. I can't believe that it was a simple config file that was causing the problem!

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

that seems to be a samba issue rather than a nautilus one

[Martin G Miller (mgmiller)]

I have 6 Ubuntu 8.04.1 machines and all of them developed the same problem at about the same time. The workaround noted above of editing smb.conf worked in all 6 machines. It does take about 44 seconds for the Places > Network applet to appear, but after that, browsing the network is fine. I also had to log off and back on to get it to work.

Thank you.