Broken SMB Shares in Fedora 35
This issue has now been resolved in Fedora 35 and 36 via package upgrades. If you are affected, upgrading your packages should fix the issue. If you are using a different distro, the original post is below—maybe it will be helpful.
SMB shares are currently broken in Gnome on Fedora 35, and potentially other distributions. If you have upgraded your Fedora 35 packages since late April 2022, you may encounter this error message when attempting to open an SMB share in Nautilus:
Failed to mount Windows share: Invalid argument
However, manual testing with smbclient shows that the SMB connection is actually fine, and I can connect to my SMB share without any issues:
[david@Abraxas ~]$ smbclient \\\\filepile\\archives -U david
Password for [SAMBA\david]:
Try "help" to get a list of possible commands.
smb: \> dir
. D 0 Mon Aug 23 19:52:25 2021
.. D 0 Sat Sep 18 13:04:36 2021
Personal D 0 Mon Aug 23 19:51:49 2021
General D 0 Fri Mar 11 20:24:49 2022
7810221624 blocks of size 1024. 4482518988 blocks available
The Problem
The root problem affecting Nautilus is a compatibility issue between gvfs 1.50.0 (and earlier) and these Samba versions:
- Samba 4.14.13 (and later)
- Samba 4.15.7 (and later)
- Samba 4.16.0 (and later)
Fedora 35 uses gvfs 1.48.1, and was affected when Samba 4.15.7 was rolled out late April. Fedora 36 beta was using gvfs 1.50.0, and was similarly affected by Samba 4.16. However, this has already been fixed by upgrading gvfs to 1.50.1.
The Solution
gvfs 1.50.1 includes Gnome's official fix for this issue. If gvfs 1.50.1 is available to you (e.g. Fedora 36 beta users), consider upgrading to it.
To my knowledge, gvfs 1.50.1 won't be made available for Fedora 35. However, the fix is being backported by the Fedora maintainers as gvfs-1.48.1-3. It will be available in the stable package repository shortly.
Workaround
If you can't upgrade gvfs yet, consider downgrading your Samba version as a workaround. In Fedora 35, you can downgrade your Samba packages to 4.15.0 using dnf:
sudo dnf downgrade samba
After downgrading to a compatible version, you should be able to open SMB shares in Nautilus again.
To avoid accidentally upgrading Samba until the gvfs fix is available, most package managers include an exclusion
option. For example, Fedora 35 users can install all package updates except for Samba using the
--exclude argument with dnf:
sudo dnf upgrade --exclude=*samba*,*smb*
Further Information
- Samba bug report #14983
- gvfs bug report #611
- Fedora 36 bug report #2068976
- Status of gvfs-1.48.1-3 package for Fedora 35