Re: smb crashes

[Johnathan Bailes <johnathan bailes esi baesystems com>]

On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 10:38, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> I've was trawling through some of the open nautilus bugs
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/weekly-bug-summary.html
> yesterday, and I noticed that there are a _lot_ of crashes that mention
> smb/samba. I'm probably the last person to notice this.
> 
> Does anyone know if there are any particular problem areas? Are the problems
> in gnome-vfs, or how nautilus uses it? Has Ximian made this any better with
> XD2?
> 

XD2 in my experience so far has made things somewhat better.  However,
it is still possible to crash the smb: view.  I can reproduce one crash
on trying to access a file but another file of the same type works. 
Permissions maybe?  Other times sporadically if you try to go to a
smb:// bookmark while the smb:// view is refreshing or loading it up it
will crash but not consistently.  

There are still two outstanding issues even with XD2's samba browsing:

1.  

If a user tries to access a file with a default
file type associated to an application that cannot
access samba locations you get the message that
the user can copy the file locally but that the
application cannot open files from a samba
location.  This is bad.  

Konqueror gets around this by copying and then
opening the file locally with the associated
application.  The file is then monitored for saved
changes and the user is prompted if the file is
changed whether or not the file should be uploaded
to the server.  

Regardless of whether or not you approve of the Konqueror method 
there should be some way to access samba located file for non-smb aware
programs.  Simply waiting for all apps to samba aware is not enough 
especially for Ximian which is touting its MS interoperability.
(Filed a XD2 bug against this but should I file a Nautilus one as well?)

2.  

Whenever a host or a share or sometimes even a file is accessed through the
samba view in Nautilus the user is prompted for the password.  There should
be a place in user preferences to set the default username and password for
samba browsing or at the very least to securely cache the username and
password for the session in which the user is accessing a host. 
(I filed a Nautilus bug on this ages ago. Should it really be a control
center wishlist item?)

-- 
Johnathan Bailes <johnathan bailes esi baesystems com>