Shutting down server causes Nautilus to slow down on Remote Ubuntu clients (SAMBA CIFS)

I have a very similar problem. The boundary conditions are:
- I have two smb shares mounted using CIFS and fstab
- the smb shares are on a Windoze server
- the network connection sometimes drops for a short time (seconds)
- client is Ubuntu 7.04 on a Dell laptop

As long as the smb shares are mounted, Nautilus sometimes becomes stalled (i.e. I have to wait for many seconds for a new window to open). If I unmount the smb shares, the problem goes away.

Matthias

It does seem to have some similarities.

Depending on what exactly is happening it may be the same.
You mentioned that the network connection is dropping. This is the same essentially as shutting down the server, at least as far as the networking is concerned. Either way the shares are accessible, this would cause Nautilus to slow down/stall.
You then unmount the shares and the problem is gone.

What hardware are you using?
I'm using an asus board, K8V-mx it has a via chipset K8M800 and VT8237, with realtek RTL8201 onboard network adapter. I've always wondered about this since if this was a wide spread problem you would probably hear more about it in the forum.

I haven't thought to try swapping in a different network card till now but I just might give it a try this weekend.

OK so I tried the new network card already. It was a 3com 905-tx. It made no difference.
However recently I installed the Kubuntu KDE desktop on my system to see if it would make any difference in a few areas. One are being this.
The difference it made was that Konqueror performs perfectly after shutting down the system and Nautilus alone has this issue. Dang since I like nautilus better.

What interesting out my test is this.
I shut down the server and tested nautilus, as soon as the shares became unavailable nautilus had the problem.
I tried Konqueror and it was fast.
I then restarted the server, as soon as the login screen came for Ubuntu, shares available, nautilus sprang to life again.
 No unmounting, no ctrl, alt backspace to restart things. It is totally and completely dependant on the shares being available or unavailable.
So for you if you have networking issues ie. your connection drops you would have the same problems.

PS on a curiosity note, are you crossover cable to connect both your computers? straight computer to computer? If so ditch that setup, buy a cheap hub/switch and watch your connection problems disappear. If your not setup this way I have no idea why your connection keeps dropping.

1. My hardware: a Dell laptop (Latitude D800). I don't think it's a
hardware issue since things work well outside of Nautilus (see point 3)
and also in Windows.
2. The network is the one I have in my office (i.e. the company
network). No idea about the details, but its certainly a lot bigger than
just a direct cable in between the client and the server...
3. I'm not surprised that Konqueror does not have the problem. The
problem seems to be limited to Nautilus because I can browse my files
perfectly well using the terminal while Nautilus is having his 'breaks'.

Matthias

On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 02:54 +0000, sonicsteve wrote:
> OK so I tried the new network card already. It was a 3com 905-tx. It made no difference.
> However recently I installed the Kubuntu KDE desktop on my system to see if it would make any difference in a few areas. One are being this.
> The difference it made was that Konqueror performs perfectly after shutting down the system and Nautilus alone has this issue. Dang since I like nautilus better.
>
> What interesting out my test is this.
> I shut down the server and tested nautilus, as soon as the shares became unavailable nautilus had the problem.
> I tried Konqueror and it was fast.
> I then restarted the server, as soon as the login screen came for Ubuntu, shares available, nautilus sprang to life again.
> No unmounting, no ctrl, alt backspace to restart things. It is totally and completely dependant on the shares being available or unavailable.
> So for you if you have networking issues ie. your connection drops you would have the same problems.
>
> PS on a curiosity note, are you crossover cable to connect both your
> computers? straight computer to computer? If so ditch that setup, buy a
> cheap hub/switch and watch your connection problems disappear. If your
> not setup this way I have no idea why your connection keeps dropping.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

Just for the record: the problem has been fixed a long time ago (either in 7.04 or 7.10, I don't remember).

mbrennwa wrote:
> Just for the record: the problem has been fixed a long time ago (either
> in 7.04 or 7.10, I don't remember).
>
>
I'm going to have to setup a samba mount and test it. I got away from
doing that most because of this issue. It would be nice if this has been
fixed.

Thanks. Let us know about your tests.

Closing due to the latest comments regarding this being fixed.

Don't hesitate to submit any new bug.

Well I have the same problem with my home network. One computer is running Ubuntu Hardy, the other WinXP. This my fstab line: //path/to/share /media/share cifs iocharset=utf8,credentials=/path/to/.smbcredentials,gid=1001 0 0

When I shut down the WinXP computer which hosts the share and then try to open "Computer" from the "Places" menu Nautilus takes a very very very long time to load.

I have the same problem. In my case the server is a SAMBA server running under Linux, and the client is a laptop running an up-to-date Ubuntu "hardy". Several SMB partitions are mounted on my laptop via automount, for example:

$ cat /etc/auto.freak
# ...
pictures -fstype=nfs,nosuid,nodev,intr freak:/home/pictures

The server "freak" is at home, unreachable from the internet. When I am at work and try to open a nautilus window, it takes ages (multiple minutes). If I connect an strace to the nautilus process, I see system calls like the following:

access("/freak/pictures/incoming/canon", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
access("/freak/pictures/incoming/canon", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
access("/freak/pictures/incoming/canon", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

each one taking about 30 seconds to time out. This is the case even if the directory that I am opening with nautilus is on a locally-mounted partition. The directories that are being sought are directories that I have recently accessed using nautilus while at home (i.e., while those SMB shares were accessible). During this time, the automounted partitions are *not* mounted (as determined from the "mount" command).

The long delays make nautilus nearly useless. I hope this information helps diagnose the problem. Let me know if I can help you with any more information.

A followup to my last post: if I "kill -HUP" nautilus then allow it to restart, then the new instance runs fine (presumably until the remotely-mounted filesystem is used again).

To follow up with my situation,
1. I don't use FSTAB to mount network drives anymore. As long as I'm
using applications that integrate well into Gnome I'm OK.
2. This same bug will cause Nautilus to pause when connecting to Network
storage devices. I have a netgear SC101 I found software that allows it
to be used with Linux. However when connecting to the device Nautilus
will hang/pause until the netgear device has initialized out of it's
sleep mode. If the device decides to not wake up Nautilus will pause for
a very long time.

Michael Haggerty wrote:
> A followup to my last post: if I "kill -HUP" nautilus then allow it to
> restart, then the new instance runs fine (presumably until the remotely-
> mounted filesystem is used again).
>
>