Just installed Tumbleweed onto an old ish HP Elitebook G4 with dual SSD’s (120 Gb with Tumbleweed and 256 Gb for Data etc), Ive been able to mount the 256Gb and can access that through “Other Locations” “Computer” “mnt” “Data”, so all good there however I cannot browse “Networks” “Windows Network” I get the following error message
“Unable to access location”
“Failed to retrieve share list from server: No such file or directory”
I’ve made that under Yast Samba the workgroup is set to “workgroup” to match my Windows machines, I even set “client min protocol = smb3” this has made no difference - I’m at a bit of a loss now - Yes I have tried searching but nothing specific to my issue or at least help I can understand comes up
First thing you should do is to configure a network connection directly to the network share… That would indicate no problem with the share itself, only browsing the available shares which may require allowing and configuring the NetBIOS protocol and related NetBIOS name resolution (which is not the same as hostname resolution which is based on /etc/hosts and DNS).
Thanks for that - I’ll just map drives from now on as that works fine . A bit annoying that its still included if it doesn’t work though just serves to confuse new folks
Actually,
I don’t know of any unaddressed NetBIOS protocol issues…
But yes NetBIOS has various features which make it unsuitable to be used over insecure networks like the Internet (but can be wrapped in tunnels like VPNs)
The NetBIOS protocol was deprecated by Microsoft (who literally invented the use in earliest Lanman days) and simply became outmoded, particularly when it was decided to implement and standardize on Internet standards… which included such things as Hostname resolution and DNS instead of NetBIOS Name Resolution and WINS servers. During those times when the Internet was taking off and becoming a dominant way way to communicate, people had to set up dual systems to handle both ways for machines to communicate on their private networks… Double the servers, double the configurations and additionally support ways that both systems would be able to pass information between each other. When MS created Active Directory to replace NT Domain network security (which was the big network successor to Lanman and Workgroups), everything related to using the NetBIOS protocol was deprecated (but not the NetBIOS internal messaging within the Windows OS which was very different). From that point somewhere around the year 2000 for about 6 years, every new AD network was expected to be built without NetBIOS but retained backwards compatibility for situations where networks were upgraded.
But, we in the Linux world had to live with the NetBIOS protocol for a lot longer because SAMBA 4 was stuck, and problems couldn’t be overcome to remove the reliance on NetBIOS in SAMBA 3.x. When Microsoft finally relented and contributed development (and IP?) to SAMBA 4, after more than a decade not making any progress was finally able to release a version that was reasonably reliable and over 99% compatible with AD so now today we even have SAMBA which can almost fully replace Windows as Domain Controllers. The only tiny issue I don’t know has ever been fixed is related to Domain Controller replication, so can’t reliably be used in a very big (maybe over 300 machine?) network where you’d need to have multiple active Domain Controllers.
Anyway… That’s today’s history lesson as I understand it…
TSU
I’m not sure what you’re trying to convey here. Quite simply, the OP was describing the lack of samba discovery/browsing functionality via Nautilus or Dolphin that formerly utilised NetBIOS, (and from a samba perspective that meant using SMB1). I typically just save the required (URL) shortcuts to samba shares in my Dolphin ‘Places’ panel.
FWIW, Linux samba hosts can still be discovered by DNS-SD, so file managers such as Dolphin can use that mechanism instead (Network > Network). This works well. Ideally WS-Discovery could be implemented in the samba code for ‘discovery compatibility’ with modern Windows hosts.
This article discusses the used of a small wsdd daemon to advertise Linux samba shares to Windows hosts…
…but this doesn’t help samba to discover Windows shares unfortunately.