Windows unavailable network drive handling

[BobF64]

Strange software.

Is it just that it provides no way to browse for network drives? typing your own paths isn't allowed? or "\\<name/ip>\sharename" doesnt work?

It obviously supports network drives, otherwise it wouldn't work via a mapping.

[watercooled]

That doesn't seem to work sadly, even for the app that allows selection through a dialogue, the network location doesn't show up in the dialogue. But like I say the symlink method:

mklink /D C:\NAS\users \\ip.address.to.NAS\share

Seems to work OK in that these applications are able to see it. I just wonder if there are any issues with e.g. file permissions I should know about? E.g. I get the lock icon on folders, but as far as I can tell, I can still access the contents fine, and nothing looks different under permissions?

Edit: @BobF64 - it's actually not unusual at all, lots of software will not work with network locations. With mapped locations, software does not have to explicitly support network drives as, as far as it's concerned, it's just another driver letter in Windows.

[peterb]

Windows connections to Samba shares can be tricky, and the SMB.conf file on the server does need to be looked at carefully.

There are two processes running, the smbd daemon and the nmbd daemon., and the no dd daemon must be started first. Normally that will be taken care of by the server.

If you haven't already done so, do have a look at the global configuration section of the SMB.conf file (might be named differently in Debian, but you should find it in /etc/samba.

It pays to have a good read of the documentation at the project website, and you can discover lots of nifty ways of achieving desired behaviour.

You can get problems with permissions, the *nix file permission regime doesn't map easily to the NTFS permissions schema.

Not saying this is the problem, but I had some similar issues a way back (root cause was a strangely defective disk in a RAID system) but optimising the samb configuration file did make a difference.


Odd really as SMB (Server Message Block) protocol was developed by Microsoft, and as others pointed out, lead to the open source SAMBA implementation. SAMBA is pretty good though, interoperability between * nix (all flavours, including BSD/OSX) with each other also with Windows.

[watercooled]

In my case it's the server not being present that causes the hangs in Explorer - it works fine when I'm actually on the LAN with the server.

If you have any SMB shares yourself (and can play about with them), have one mapped to a drive letter in Windows, then disconnect from the network or something and reboot. Notice how long it takes to log in. Explorer really isn't graceful at handling missing drives as it will essentially hang the process until it times out retrying access to the drive. But so much as dragging a file past the NAS icon causes the hang too, which is really irritating as it lasts something like a minute.

I'm on Win7 but it's possible it's somehow fixed in 10 (it was still present in 8 when I tried it).

[peterb]

Hmm, interesting, although not something I've noticed particularly, although I use directory Opus as a substitute for file explorer on my only Windows (7)! Machine which gets little use these days, (mainly legacy apps, and they are being migrated to a VM). Unfortunately I can't play with it for a few days

[watercooled]

Been busy the past couple of days but I've just had another play with things and it seems I might have been completely wrong about the number of programs not supporting UNC paths - even though I can't navigate to the network location, I just tried typing it in manually and it... just... worked... ??

So thanks for the help guys, this just might work. I'll try configuring the things I can think of with UNC paths, unmap my network drives and leave it for a couple of days to see if anything breaks.

[FiLiNuX]

What version of Windows are you using?

"It seems like a massive usability oversight if it needs scripts to resolve it."

I do not think any scripts are needed to resolve your issue just a configuration issue somewhere. I have a HP Microserver running Ubuntu Server that gets heavy daily use for my streaming, backups, and general storage drives. I have a few different HDD's in it with several Samba shares but even the slowest/oldest of the HDDs works fast & snappy without issue. They are accessible via GB network on my Win 10 machine (previously win 7) as mapped drives and are up / useable as fast as I can click without issue. I say all of this to show it is possible to have it just work well. Two things I have personally seen that could cause similar symptoms to what you describe is your smb.conf is not configured properly (it may work fine via a *nix box but not windows!) and the other thing (and this took a WHILE for me to diagnose) was a switch that was not working correctly. Would you be OK posting just the RELEVANT information from your smb.conf as that may help.