Dave Heinemann

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:

Unable to access location Failed to mount Windows share: Invalid argument
Unable to access location
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:

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

Do you have any thoughts or feedback? Let me know via email!

#Fedora #Linux