Mga7 and Network Sharing problems [Closed]

Mga7 and Network Sharing problems [Closed]

Postby rodgoslin » Jul 17th, '19, 05:58

Setting up my Lenovo Thinkpad t420 with Mga7, I'm having a problem with setting up Access Windows shared drives and directories. I have two Drobo units, which together serve files to my local network, which includes Mageia, Windows and Android devices. It's been some time since I had to setup Mageia, and things may have slipped my memory, but I don't think I've had any problem in the past. The Thinkpad is a minority user on the network, but still needs to access the Drobo servers. The difficulty is that Mga7 Control Centre facility does not see any servers. Clicking on "Search Servers" brings up nothing. I can ping the drobo units successfully,, so connection seems not to be a problem. Security Firewall might be a problem, but opening this and ticking off SSH server, FTP server, NFS server, Cups server, and Bittorrent, as in all other Mageia is done. However the relevant entry, which has always, to my knowledge, been there, Windows Files Serving (SMB), is absent. In the past SMB sharing has always struck a problem, since the Search Servers function always finds servers by name, and not by address, and fstab requires an address rather than a name. I've always got round this with an entry in /etc/hosts. However, in this case, it's not relevant since I can't get that far. Any ideas? Have I missed some point in installation?
Last edited by rodgoslin on Jul 29th, '19, 22:32, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems

Postby ITA84 » Jul 17th, '19, 09:18

Regarding the Firewall settings, those are just for incoming connections, not outgoing ones, so that shouldn't be the problem (that you don't have the SMB option could mean that you don't have a Samba server installed on the system, but I'm not 100% sure). I don't think I can help you much with this, sorry, I could just suggest you to try mounting the share via commandline (mount.cifs) to see if that works or if at least it gives you more clues as to what isn't working
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems

Postby rodgoslin » Jul 17th, '19, 10:47

Yes, sorry. It didn't come to me at the time. I dug out an older Asus netbook, with mga5 on it, but not fully setup. That found the drobo units, or at least, one of them. The facility seems a bit on the flaky side. It does not always find all available servers, and when it does the fstab settings do not work, since the identity of the server is name only, and not address. In addition, the facility no longer has the option to add a password, for incorporation into fstab. A while back, the system changed, for the reasonable reason that the server password was readable in fstab. Then later, again that all seemed to have gone, and it was back to readable passwords again. I'm going to try bypassing the Control Centre entirely, and edit the /etc/fstab file to the same entry as this machine, which works
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems

Postby rodgoslin » Jul 25th, '19, 14:14

Well, it did work! I now have full access to my two Drobo units. There were a couple of hiccups, of a relatively minor nature. The main one being the absence of /sbin/mount.cifs, which is a bit strange, and required the installation of cifs-utils. Why this is not in the standard install is a bit beyond me.
FWIW, The Drobo despite it's operating system being Linux based is not kind to the Linux user. The standard sharing package details the contents of the Drobo as being owned by root, and while the user has read rights, he/she does not have the ability to write to the unit. I got round this, when I found that root on the PC was perfectly capable of writing to the Drobo. I came in for an awful lot of flak on this forum, for suggesting a command modification for Konqueror, which allowed this to be run as root. It worked, and for me that was good enough. However, much later, and of my own research, I found the by adding uid='username' and uid='username' (no quotes) to the mount command line, as appropriate, all files, directories, etc. were listed as owned by 'username', and the group was 'username', and the problem was properly solved. Again, why this information was not commonly available is a bit beyond me. I've no idea whether this applies to other NAS units, or not. Drobo is definitely my choice. I'll leave this to circulate for a bit, and then mark it [Solved]
Ah, one last thing. Now that it all works, Mageia Control Centre sharing facility now finds both of the Drobo units!!!
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems

Postby doktor5000 » Jul 27th, '19, 11:03

rodgoslin wrote:The main one being the absence of /sbin/mount.cifs, which is a bit strange, and required the installation of cifs-utils. Why this is not in the standard install is a bit beyond me.

Because it pulls in quite a lot of dependencies, which would pollute the "standard install" for users who don't need that.
That was also already mentioned in your earlier bugreport: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22011#c15
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems

Postby rodgoslin » Jul 27th, '19, 15:49

Ah, yes. I can understand that. The total file size of the cifs-utils being a massive 320KB, could be a serious loss of capacity. No doubt there's also a very good reason why the "standard install", at least for my Euro Brit install, also includes a South African, presumably Afrikaans, install, of Firefox, and has done for many years now.
Thanks for the reminder of my earlier bug report. History is very important. Those who forget history are sure to have to re-learn the lessons learned at an earlier time.
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems

Postby doktor5000 » Jul 28th, '19, 15:24

rodgoslin wrote:Ah, yes. I can understand that. The total file size of the cifs-utils being a massive 320KB, could be a serious loss of capacity.

You don't seem to understand it at all, judging by your comment on the "massive 320KB" of that package alone.
If you would do a minimal install, and then add cifs-utils, you would see that this pulls in nearly 20MB worth of packages.
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems

Postby rodgoslin » Jul 28th, '19, 16:52

Well, perhaps, I stand corrected, but the entry for the cifs-install, quoted below, only lists the install as 320KB. The actual file /usr/sbin/mount.cifs is only 40KB in size. Since I allocated 20GB for the machine partition, the 20MB you indicate for the install still only accounts for 0.1% of the whole. As we Brits would say "A mere drop in the ocean"


Code: Select all
 Version: 6.4-4.mga5
        Currently installed version: 6.4-4.mga5
        Group: Networking/Other
        Architecture: x86_64
        Size: 320 KB
        Medium: None (installed)
        URL:
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems

Postby doktor5000 » Jul 29th, '19, 17:46

rodgoslin wrote:the 20MB you indicate for the install still only accounts for 0.1% of the whole. As we Brits would say "A mere drop in the ocean"

You only care about your own use case, but don't recognise that others don't have the same use case.
Imagine people are doing minimal installations for testing purposes or to deploy containers in cloud environments.
Now take that 20MB and multiply it with say 100.000 installations. That's a lot of wasted internet bandwidth that you want to enforce on everybody.
Just because you forgot to install a 320KB package ... :roll:
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems

Postby rodgoslin » Jul 29th, '19, 22:31

Perhaps you should just issue a blank dvd without software and suggest that the user should pick out their own choice of software, from scratch. This is supposed to be a complete package. Using Samba is an option in this package, the required software should be in that package. Mount.cifs is required for that option. Get professional Doktor
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems

Postby doktor5000 » Jul 30th, '19, 18:20

rodgoslin wrote:Using Samba is an option in this package, the required software should be in that package. Mount.cifs is required for that option.

Well, the proposal for that is in your bugreport since 2 years: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22011#c12
Why didn't you follow up on that? Instead now you're asking the same question from the bugreport in the forums ...
You know, Mageia is done by voluntary contributors, that spend their free time to create a few operating system for others to use and enjoy.

Can you imagine what it feels like being yelled at because something from this free operating system is not working exactly as a user expects?
And the user often expects free, professional support similar to a paid support contract?

What was your snarky comment - Get professional ? Yeah sure ... :roll:
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems [Closed]

Postby rodgoslin » Jul 30th, '19, 19:22

Well, yes. I do expect that if something is not working, the creators of that system would do something to correct it, if it was brought to their attention. I put things on the forum, in the hope that someone with the same problem, has found a solution., which they are prepared to share with me. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. In the absence of any documentation, professional or otherwise, what else is there?
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Re: Mga7 and Network Sharing problems [Closed]

Postby isadora » Jul 30th, '19, 19:35

It's so easy bad-naming people. It would be much more appreciated contributing in constructive ways.
Assuming the topic is closed as you already mentioned, i do so in that order.
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