Linux Mint Forums

Glad to see that he's a bit more upbeat this month

I pretty much only post about samba in this forum and I have a different perspective on your recommendation:

It is my opinion that users relying on Samba a lot should be recommended to stick to Mint 18.x until these issues are fully resolved.

The improvements to samba in Ubuntu 18.04 ( Mint 19 ) far outweighs the problems induced by it. It's really a tale of two Sambas. Samba in a Linux / MacOS network and Samba with Windows.

I know this will not sound right to many users but Samba in Ubuntu 18.04 looks like it was designed for an all Linux / MacOS network. The moment you install Samba on Ubuntu 18.04 it invokes a now properly configured parameter ( multicast dns register ) that instantly registers itself to the rest of the network. All other Linux machines and all other MacOS machines will see that machine without making any adjustments to their system. It does all that precisely because it's not using gvfsd-smb-browse. It's using Avahi ( Bonjour in MacOS ).

To compound the irony the problem with samba in Ubuntu 18.04 involves working with Windows - but it had no choice.

Windows 10 on new builds disables SMB1 on the server end and Ubuntu 16.04 ( Mint 18 ) can only access servers using that dialect of smb - by default. Mint 18 can see the Win10 machines but cannot access it under these conditions. The change to samba was to allow it to communicate at the smb3 level if required but that messed up host discovery ( gvfsd-smb-browse which involves NetBIOS not avahi ).

But being able to discover a Win10 machine and being able to connect to one under these conditions are two different things. Mint 19 can still access the Win 10 machine but has to do so explicitly by hostname, ip address, or mDNS name - like one would do when using Connect to Server.

All modern operating systems communicate with the SMB3 dialect of SMB since it is much faster, less prone to disconnects, and more secure than SMB1 so I'm willing to put up with the occasional problems.

Clem's blog wrote:If something won’t work out, we part ways, [...], but when that happens I’m not sure we should necessarily talk publicly about it. [...], but we’re a team and so I might mention individual names when things are great, but I hope you’ll understand I don’t when things don’t work out. We’ll face these issues together as a team [...]

Haha, that's so rich I literally laughed out loud. If you don't want to talk about it you should stick to your own advice and do just that, otherwise other people might want to start talking publicly as well. Just saying...

altair4 wrote: ⤴Fri May 03, 2019 8:12 am The improvements to samba in Ubuntu 18.04 ( Mint 19 ) far out way the problems induced by it.

Depends on your perspective, I understand why a new user will just think that it doesn't work and how that creates a problem. But from my own perspective I fully agree with you.