Greetings, I have searched and searched for about three hours now trying to find a resolution none of which do a thing. I'm hoping since the community here is quite responsive you might be able to help me.

Why the heck is it so hard to get Lucid to connect to a samba share?

Alright heres the details: I recently setup a Maverick Samba server (I know I shouldn't have went bleeding edge) with multiple file shares. Windows XP connects to all three shares I have setup with no problems at all and accepts the credentials. I have a laptop and a media pc both of which run Lucid and neither of them seem to connect they both just continually prompt me for credentials. Now I'm a bit confused shouldn't Windows have the problems and not linux?

What I have done so far:

I have ripped all samba out of the media center pc completely. All dependencies and everything. (That was a pain as there were broken dependencies out of the box)

I reinstalled the entire samba package even server

I installed smbfs

I configured samba to use share level permissions instead of user (smb.conf)

I installed system-samba-config and changed the saved password as well

I can browse (nautilus) the base samba share and see the folders but when it comes to accessing them it prompts me for credentials continually.

I can list the shares from command with smbclient -L server no problem (syntax)

Still nothing, any ideas what could possibly be the problem? I'm sure you'll want to see my smb.conf file but seriously shouldn't one ubuntu system be able to talk to another ubuntu system without a bunch of bologna?

(Sorry if it seems a bit rant like, I'm just a bit perturbed. Everything with my setup has been a piece of cake until now.)

I have a similar setup, I use a Ubuntu system running samba. I intermittently get either the repeating credentials issue, or just no connection to the server. what usually fixes it is going to Places, and Connect to Server and choosing "Windows Share" even though it is Samba, and filling out the info and trying to connect then. sometimes that works, and sometimes that doesn't work but i find a few minutes after doing that I can then connect through Nautilus. It hasn't happened in a while though so I could be forgetting something.

Hmm, thanx for the quick response and possible direction. It sounds a bit like a bug although I think there are quite a few similar bug reports. I may have tried that but I will actually test it now on my laptop before I test it on my media pc.

Well no luck there unfortunately, the logs say it's using the wrong password. What a pain in the neck, such a trivial thing ends up being so complicated. So no working out of the box, oh well. I will post the resolution when I find it so hopefully someone will find this post when they run into the same problem.

Alright so the answer is don't use nautilus in fact don't use any gui you'll only get angry. Go strait to the command line and mount the share, problem solved.

sudo mkdir /mnt/MOUNTDIR
sudo mount.cifs //SERVERIPADDRESS/SAMBASHARE /mnt/MOUNTDIR -o username="SAMBAUSERNAME",password=SAMBAPASSWORD,iocharset=utf8

Tada! What a bunch of hooey seriously. Oh make sure you have samba-common smbclient and smbfs installed.

If anyone's messing with XBMC on an Ubuntu box and you want to connect to an Ubuntu Maverick Samba server this is the answer. It's indirect IMHO but it works.