So. I don't know if it's a samba thing, an ubuntu thing, a gnome thing, or yet another thing. But accessing smb folders with a large amount of files is waaaay slower with Ubuntu than with windows. Also: will we ever get thumbnails?
Samba on Linux the Easy Way
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way
#12I have given up on Samba on my home network. It's just 2 pi, 2 laptops but client randomly loses connection to folders or dolphin/nautilus stop seeing folders, hit refresh, there it is again, etc. I just use sshfs and I am done with it. I just want to easily move files around my network and samba took too many hours of my life to look at what's wrong this year with client version or spaces in shared folders. It's alw…
I took the time to debug all the Samba issues between my Pis and Linux + Windows desktop computers. Most of the time there are two separate problems: 1. Samba share is not discovered in the network. All my problems were gone after installing wsdd2. 2. Permissions. Especially Windows clients implicitly try to login with an empty password to check if the share can accessed without one. This can lead to problems with th…
(reacting to your writeup)
- gvfs might not support ws-discovery for smb discovery, but neither does macos. They both support dns-sd/bonjour/zeroconf for that; so getting up avahi up and running with advertising the smb service is the easiest way to handle both. Synology does this OOB, for example.
- gvfs is not an implementation of samba. It is a frontend to libsmbclient library from the samba package. Unfortunately, libsmbclient does read smb.conf and adjusts itself accordingly, without the consumers of the library having a say in it. The best way to debug gvfs problems is to start with empty smb.conf.
Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way
#13Entertaining writing, but also a bunch of fluff I don't see the point of? It's not like setting up a share is hard, I'm missing the point of why something that's already easy would need an "easy way". Now, Samba as an AD DC, across multiple sites, integrating with Kerberos and LDAP, so that users can have a single sign on experience across platforms... That, I'd be impressed at an "easy way" guide. ;-) I think I'm no…
Maybe I'm weird, but what's difficult with Samba as an AD DC, with multiple sites or trusts? It seems easy to me, all you need to know is on the samba wiki.
The biggest "problem" is that distros do not ship Samba packages with DC support, you either have to use 3rd-party build like Tranquil's or build your own.
Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way
#14So. I don't know if it's a samba thing, an ubuntu thing, a gnome thing, or yet another thing. But accessing smb folders with a large amount of files is waaaay slower with Ubuntu than with windows. Also: will we ever get thumbnails?
Isn't there a setting in nautilus for the thumbnails? I can't test it at the moment unfortunately as my server's SSD died recently and I haven't set up samba again. I remember it working, but being slow depending on the type of file. I guessed at the time some files seemed to need to read the entire file first.
Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way
#15Personally, I think that SFTP can be a decent option. Though on Windows hosts that want to access said files, I've found myself needing something like RaiDrive or a similar piece of software: https://www.raidrive.com/
That said, the performance is pretty good and it seems rather stable, I haven't had many issues to date at all. Though my use case is also decidedly simple: just a "push" setup for files/backups when I want to move things from one of my local HDDs to another one that's running on a homelab server. Some might go for a NAS setup, though the simplicity of a SSH key for SFTP is hard to beat.
No idea why Windows doesn't support something like that natively.
Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way
#16So. I don't know if it's a samba thing, an ubuntu thing, a gnome thing, or yet another thing. But accessing smb folders with a large amount of files is waaaay slower with Ubuntu than with windows. Also: will we ever get thumbnails?
Theres a really good rant/writeup about thumbnails and gnome/linux.
https://randthoughts.github.io/little-rant-about-gnomes-file...
Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way
#17I'd be happy to get Samba and macOS working together that way macOS doesn't disconnect mounted drives a few times per hour.
Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way
#18Entertaining writing, but also a bunch of fluff I don't see the point of? It's not like setting up a share is hard, I'm missing the point of why something that's already easy would need an "easy way". Now, Samba as an AD DC, across multiple sites, integrating with Kerberos and LDAP, so that users can have a single sign on experience across platforms... That, I'd be impressed at an "easy way" guide. ;-) I think I'm no…
Maybe I'm weird, but what's difficult with Samba as an AD DC, with multiple sites or trusts? It seems easy to me, all you need to know is on the samba wiki. The biggest "problem" is that distros do not ship Samba packages with DC support, you either have to use 3rd-party build like Tranquil's or build your own.
You're probably right, AND, I'm speaking about doing this ~a decade ago. I expect things have improved, but if I recall correctly, the challenge was all the integration with external systems (krb5, LDAP, print stuff). Took more than a month, but was a thing of beauty to have windows and linux desktops, where you type your password _once_, and then everything just works, and you have the same experience regardless of computer. For some reason I remember spending a lot of time on getting the printing to be one click working... shrug
I guess my only point was that samba for just sharing files is already super easy, so I don't get what an "easy way" is for. :) You might be saying "but hard things are easy too", implying that you're more experienced than me at samba and/or the software itself has improved. I wouldn't be surprised if both were true.
Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way
#19I have given up on Samba on my home network. It's just 2 pi, 2 laptops but client randomly loses connection to folders or dolphin/nautilus stop seeing folders, hit refresh, there it is again, etc. I just use sshfs and I am done with it. I just want to easily move files around my network and samba took too many hours of my life to look at what's wrong this year with client version or spaces in shared folders. It's alw…
NFS gets a bad rep. I use it everywhere with 0 problems or configuration headaches. Sure, I wouldn't use it in situations where security is a concern, but for me and all my computers? It's wonderful. And SO much faster than sshfs.
Re: Samba on Linux the Easy Way
#20Once I figured it out, over 20 years ago, I’ve found it trivial since. Though not as simple as sharing on Windows.
A friend of mine has been trying to learning Linux this month, and he came to me frustrated, losing his mind. A whole day going all over the place on the Internet, obviously following tutorials he didn’t understand, and installing who knows what, and I asked, did you install SAMBA? He asked, what’s that? However the package was installed and I explained smb.conf file and SMB user.
The problem is people are lazy and don’t want to look stupid. So they will spend days searching the web, reading through the endless ‘blind leading the blind’ user forums (Ubuntu comes to mind), instead of RTFM. And won’t ask someone for help until they have wrapped their brain into a frustrated knot.