Re: Nautilus network browse list problem

[Tomas Bzatek <tbzatek redhat com>]

On Mon, 2010-11-08 at 13:20 +0100, Andreas Heinlein wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> we are currently in the process of migrating a Windows network to
> Ubuntu. In the transition, we are still heavily using SMB filesharing.
> The windows machines form a domain controlled by a samba PDC on Debian
> Linux.
> Under windows, I can see all machines in the network neighborhood as
> soon as they are online. In nautilus, it can take up to one hour for
> them to appear under "Places"->"Network". They are immediately available
> if using "Connect to server..." and entering the name manually.
> Refreshing the list via F5 or the refresh button does not help.
> 
> What might be causing this? What methods does nautilus use for creating
> the list of available computers, and which are preferred? Currently, we
> have the choice between WINS (implemented by the Samba PDC) and plain
> old windows browse lists with the samba PDC being the master browser. We
> do not have something like active directory, though we have DNS
> resolution for all clients and also a LDAP server at hand.
> Would there be other methods like DNS-SD (using static DNS entries, not
> mDNS) which are more reliable?

GVfs uses libsmbclient for accessing SMB resources and it's only up to
Samba to decide what approach will be used. And since libsmbclient
maintains API transparency, there's very little that can be changed from
client side (GVfs, Nautilus).

By default, Samba uses broadcasts to discover neighbour computers.
Unfortunately these broadcasts are usually blocked by firewalls in many
linux distributions in their default installations.

There are however some ways to configure samba clients - either by
changing system smb.conf settings or by placing custom ones in user home
directory. Better to consult with Samba folks first.

As a debug tool you can try 'smbtree' command, should give you equal
results as Nautilus.

-- 
Tomas Bzatek <tbzatek redhat com>