VLC Flatpak won’t play videos from network shares

Suddenly the Flatpak version of VLC on Ubuntu stopped playing video files directly from a network fileshare (SMB/windows share) mounted via Nautilus. The error is about VLC not being able to play "smb://" files. That's annoying because Nautilus is supposed to hide the fact that this is a network share and create then illusion of … Continue reading VLC Flatpak won’t play videos from network shares →

Samba anonymous shares

I'm currently writing up changes to the perfect, cheap NAS [1]. A major change is that I dropped support for user-level windows/samba shares and am using only a few public browsable shares. It turns out that Windows clients always ask the user for a password even though the samba share is anonymous. The reason seems … Continue reading Samba anonymous shares →

Nautilus browsing large windows share is slow

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When browsing large windows (samba) shares with Ubuntu Nautilus (that's the equivalent of the Windows File Explorer) I observed that shares which include many files and directories (a few hundred) take a few seconds to browse over WiFi, but almost instantly display over a fast LAN. A similar difference in speed is noticeable when searching … Continue reading Nautilus browsing large windows share is slow →

Resolving smb server names in Linux

Windows handles NETBIOS server names just like any other DNS entry, so you can ping, http:// or ftp to any computer on your Windows network. While Linux binds those computers also via Samba, it does not export that information to the rest of the networking stack, i.e. this will fail: ping win7machine This post [1] … Continue reading Resolving smb server names in Linux →