Recent update broke windows share browsing

[xclusive585]

Browsing windows shares stopped working on both of my LM13 Mate machines after I ran mintupdate on both machines a few days ago.

(I wish I had paid attention to the packages that were updated), I can no longer see windows shares in "network servers". This worked fine since I started using LM13, I did have to install winbind, cifs, samba, and edit nsswitch.conf to include "wins". Never any problems until I updated these machines a couple days ago. (I checked nsswitch.conf to make sure it's still how I set it, and it is unchanged)

What I do know;
-the samba share I mount to my filesystem (from a 3rd machine) at boot via fstab is working fine, so my machine(s) are still capable of connecting to a samba share... Just not capable of browsing them anymore.....
[edit: this is because browsing the shares from Linux mint is not handled by samba, but the mounting of the netowork share is]



I searched around a little and am surprised there doesn't seem to be other users that suddenly lost samba browsing ability recently...
Any ideas?

[karlchen]

Hello, Dave.

You may have missed it. MintUpdate keeps a historical list of what it installed in the course of time. Launch the MintUpdate application. Go to "View" => "Update History". You will see a list of all updates in chronological order, oldest on top, newest at the bottom. You can click on the "Date" column header in order to reverse the sorting order.
Maybe this list will help you find out which updated package(s) might be the culprit(s).

Kind regards,
Karl

[xclusive585]

Hello. Thanks for that tip. I'm still used to apt, mintupdate is the first gui update utility I've used.

So, the only packages I see that are related to networking that were updated when windows share browsing broke:

bind9-host
dnsutils
libdns81
libbind9-80

Off to examine some things.

Gut feeling is pointing me to bind9.

[xclusive585]

What I am going to do is get rid of winbind, and remove that 'wins' entry I made in nsswitch.conf.

Basically leaving my system stock.

Then I will find another way to enable windows browsing by hostname using nautilus.

In the meantime, I'll manually mount the needed shares into my filesystem with an fstab entry since that still works right.


Then in the future I'll hope and pray that Samba changes their software to listen for windows hostnames without dirty little hacks like winbind and editing nsswitch.conf

[altair4]

You might want to open this up again now that you got rid of the winbind / nsswitch "stuff". Might I suggest the following:

Samba Browsing Problems Checklist: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=88146&start=0

If you run into further issues the output of the following commands would be very helpful:

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smbtree

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testparm -s

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net usershare info --long

[xclusive585]

Samba browsing checklist? lol.
Has samba browsing of windows shares worked on Ubuntu 12.04 or LM13??

As far as I know it just doesn't work "out of the box" for "listening" for windows computers and listing them. It's well documented.

But I'll see what I can do with samba alone to get it to work with the checklist.

In the meantime,

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smbtree

produces no output

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net usershare info --long

produces no output
and

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testparm -s

yields:

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Load smb config files from /etc/samba/smb.conf
rlimit_max: increasing rlimit_max (1024) to minimum Windows limit (16384)
Processing section "[printers]"
Processing section "[print$]"
Loaded services file OK.
Server role: ROLE_STANDALONE
[global]
   server string = %h server (Samba, Ubuntu)
   map to guest = Bad User
   obey pam restrictions = Yes
   pam password change = Yes
   passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u
   passwd chat = *Enter\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *Retype\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *password\supdated\ssuccessfully* .
   unix password sync = Yes
   syslog = 0
   log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
   max log size = 1000
   dns proxy = No
   usershare allow guests = Yes
   panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d
   idmap config * : backend = tdb

[printers]
   comment = All Printers
   path = /var/spool/samba
   create mask = 0700
   printable = Yes
   print ok = Yes
   browseable = No

[print$]
   comment = Printer Drivers
   path = /var/lib/samba/printers


I always could and still can and do use samba from a command line to access windows shares. I have to use IP however.
What I would like is for windows machines to be detected so I can browse to windows shares from nautilus, especially when I have a guest windows machine in the house and I'm just quickly trying to check things out.

[altair4]

Samba browsing checklist? lol.
Has samba browsing of windows shares worked on Ubuntu 12.04 or LM13??

Samba browsing works on Ubuntu 12.04, LM13, Ubuntu 12.10, LM14 as long as you understand the rules.

As far as I know it just doesn't work "out of the box" for "listening" for windows computers and listing them. It's well documented.

It has worked out of the box for me and for home networks I have set up for at least the last 6 years - at least with Debian based distros. I'll admit that things have gotten more complicated with Win7 since it really really wants the Linux client to act like a Windows client and present a username when browsing. Prior to that I used RedHat based or SuSE distros and they seemed to go out of their way to prevent it.

As the checklist illustrates there are things that get in the way of browsing by netbios name:

Installer Impediments: Linux hostname length limits are far in excess of netbios name length limits - the installer doesn't know that.
User Impediments: aka, firewalls
Network Topology: Some folks have multiple routers and multiple subnets and they expect to browse across them - not going to happen.
Start up services: nmbd and smbd sometimes just don't run at start up. This has gotten better over time - 12.04 nailed it as far as I can tell.

And finally there are sometimes things that defy logic and it's the router itself that prevents it. An illustration is here on a brand new generation of routers where all the engineers who knew how routers work must have been fired: viewtopic.php?f=47&t=118653&p=659333#p658893

In your particular case you have a show stopper right out of the start:

In the meantime,

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smbtree

produces no output

The samba client on your machine can't "see" the samba server on your machine - it's unlikely that it will see anyone else's - see how far the checklist can get you.

[GrumpyOne]

[/quote]In your particular case you have a show stopper right out of the start:

In the meantime,

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smbtree

produces no output

The samba client on your machine can't "see" the samba server on your machine - it's unlikely that it will see anyone else's - see how far the checklist can get you.[/quote]

Firstly while I may be an embedded systems programmer of quite a few years, I'm a complete Linux noob. I've been working for about the last 7 days with an install of Mint14 +Mate in an attempt to see whether or not we can replace our Windows network with a Linux one. First impressions are that the answer is yes and all works great.. However....up until about three days ago I had access to everything on the Windows network from my Mint 14 installation straight out of the box. That's no longer the case. Now we appear to have a broken smbclient or similar since smbtree now returns nothing at all and nothing has changed about smb.conf.

Something in the recent updates has clearly broken the system since booting the machine from the LiveDVD that this installation came from gives me an smbtree that see's the entire network. What gives. Up until this point I was prepared to move all our stuff over to Linux Mint and run the few absolutely essential Windows tools in a VM but if its this easily broken I'm having second thoughts unless we can get a resolution to this. Anybody have any ideas or experienced the same during the last few days ???

[altair4]

@GrumpyOne,

I have Mate14.1-Mate installed in a VM and have kept it up to date. Sadly, all things Samba seem to be working just as they always did including smbtree. If the Samba Checklist did not resolve the issue for you something you posted may be your road out of this:

I was prepared to move all our stuff over to Linux Mint and run the few absolutely essential Windows tools in a VM but if its this easily broken I'm having second thoughts unless we can get a resolution to this

Samba itself is probably still functional since I'm betting you can in fact access each machine not by browsing to it but by accessing it directly by ip address:

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caja smb://192.168.0.100

Browning by name requires that nmbd, firewalls, name resolve order, and hostnames all work together and follow certain rules. But ironically if this is going to be an all Linux network you can use Samba and bypass all of this stuff with a little help from Apple

If you create the avahi service file in all your Linux machines as outlined in section [3b] of that HowTo, hosts will automatically show up when you click on Network in caja. As a side benefit they will also automatically show up in OSX's Finder file manager if you happen to have any macbooks around in your network.

[GrumpyOne]

@altair4

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately the majority of the network will remain Windows machines with a couple of Linux software development machines. So it looks like I'm left with digging into what broke it all. I mangaged to persuade a friend to install the same 64 bit distribution into a VM on his system last night and confirmed that as I'd found, straight out of the box it works perfectly.

Apart from adding Skype, Oracles Virtual Box software and two programming packages ( one of which required some 32 bit support packages ) not a lot has changed in the last week so I'm sure it's possible to ultimately find the culprit. I certainly hope so since Mint seems to be one of the nicest things I've used since Windows came out as a wheelbarrow full of floppy disks..