karmic smbclient fails to access NAS box

Binary package hint: samba

I have a cheap NAS box that does not understand the unix extensions of samba. Other than that, it was more or less working fine in Jaunty. After recent updates, accessing the box from Karmic is hit-and-miss at best.

smblient returns undecipherable errors that change from one second to the next

$ smbclient -L mynas
Enter rolf' password:
protocol negotiation failed: NT_STATUS_END_OF_FILE
$ smbclient -L mynas
Enter rolf's password:
Receiving SMB: Server stopped responding
session request to MYNAS failed (Call returned zero bytes (EOF))
Receiving SMB: Server stopped responding
session request to *SMBSERVER failed (Call returned zero bytes (EOF))

An autofs/smbfs mount with nounix option turned on does see the shares, but the shares themselves are empty.

$ ll /mnt/smb/mynas/
total 0
drwx------ 1 rolf rolf 0 2008-07-07 18:40 backup
drwx------ 1 rolf rolf 0 2008-07-07 18:39 Musik
drwx------ 1 rolf rolf 0 2008-07-07 18:39 PUBLIC
drwx------ 1 rolf rolf 0 2008-07-07 18:40 Video

$ ll /mnt/smb/mynas/backup/
total 0

GUI clients such as thunar or nautilus can sometimes access the shares themselves, but it's hit-and-miss. You never know if it will work today. Accessing from a hardy box usually works fine.