Share folder: session restart required before folder can be shared

Bug #256256 reported by Ben Rolfe
6
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
nautilus (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned
nautilus-share (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Please forgive me if this isn't a bug, as I'm totally new to Linux. It seems like a minor bug to me though. Also, I think the problem is in nautilus-share, but I'm not really sure - all the help on finding where a bug seemed to revolve around code errors rather than usability issues. Anyhow - the bug:

I've just done a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.04 (note that I've installed several times over the last week, and this behaviour occurs each time, so I decided to report it). I want to share a folder with other users on my network.

I right click, and select "Sharing Options", then click on the "Share this folder" checkbox. At that point, a window appears telling me that "Sharing service is not installed", and I click the "Install service" button and enter my admin password.

After a couple of minutes of downloading and installing packages, I get a window telling me that it has "Successfully applied all changes". Back on the "Folder Sharing" window ("File Manager" is displayed in the window bar), I click on the "Create Share" button.

At this point, within the "Folder Sharing" window, I am told that I don't have appropriate permissions:

 'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare: cannot open usershare directory /var/lib/samba/usershares. Error Permission denied
 You do not have permission to create a usershare. Ask your administrator to grant you permissions to create a share.

I am not given the option to enter my admin password - it just won't work. If I close this window, and try it again from the top, it still doesn't let me do it (same error) (I don't need to download and install packages again though).

I get this error whether or not I select other options in the "Folder Sharing" window.

This really had me puzzled the first time it happen and I started looking around at all the complex ways to share folders from the terminal. However, if I just reboot, everything works fine, apparently I now have permissions. Perhaps all this could be resolved with a "Please Reboot" message at the point when I'm told my changes are applied?

Revision history for this message
bascule (kennym-safe-mail) wrote :

could you please paste the output of:

lsb_release -a
apt-cache policy samba

I think there is a problem here, it is most likely that you could avoid rebooting by running in a terminal:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

so that the cjanges in smb.conf are picked up by the samba server daemon.

Revision history for this message
Thierry Carrez (ttx) wrote :

Reproduced on current hardy.

The problem is that the user gets added to the sambashare group, but the group membership won't be refreshed until the user logs out and back in. It's not really a samba problem, it's more a problem in the design of that nautilus "Sharing Options" dialog box. It should make clear that the user won't be able to share folders until he logs back in, or do some magic to get the extended rights immediately.

Changed in samba:
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson) wrote :

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 212098, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

Changed in nautilus:
status: New → Invalid
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