Solving “Failed to Mount Windows Share”

Most of the time I access my home NAS via samba shares. For increased security and performance I force it to use SMB v3 protocol. And therein lies the issue.

Whenever I tried to access my NAS from Linux Mint machine using Caja browser, I would get the same error: "Failed to mount Windows share: Connection timed out." And it wasn't connectivity issues as everything would work if I dropped my NAS to SMB v2. And it wasn't unsupported feature either as Linux supports SMB3 for a while now.

It was just a case of a bit unfortunate default configuration. Albeit man pages tell client max protocol is SMB3, something simply doesn't click. However, if one manually specifies only SMB3 is to be used, everything starts magically working.

Configuring it is easy; in /etc/samba/smb.conf, within [global], one needs to add

client min protocol = SMB3
client max protocol = SMB3

Alternatively, this can also be done with the following one-liner:

$ sudo sed -i "/\\[global\\]/a client min protocol = SMB3\nclient max protocol = SMB3" /etc/samba/smb.conf

Once these settings are in, share is accessible.

13 thoughts to “Solving “Failed to Mount Windows Share””

  1. Thank you! I’ve been trying to fix this on my Ubuntu machine for days now!

  2. After a full day trying to setup Samba to access Win10 (with no success) I was setting up Gigilo as an alternative and found your configuration for SMB3. This now allows both Samba and Gigilo to work perfectly. Many thanks.

  3. Tried for ages to fix this, your solution works fine. Now all that is needed is for sombody to fix Samba.

    Richard

  4. Millions of thanks, i searched everywhere tried every solution non worked for me except this one. now i can access my drive on win10

  5. Thanks man, this saved me. My issue was that I had used the same linux machine to access my remote shares on an old win7 without any problem but faced this error after my remote host was upgraded to win10

  6. A quick question: Do I have to modify smb.conf on:
    1) Ubuntu server machine?
    2) Ubuntu desktop workstation?
    3) Both Ubuntu server and workstation?

    Thank you so very much in advance for your kind attention and help.

  7. I have discovered a super simple solution in my case, see end of the text! … These error messages out of nothing drive me crazy… yesterday all worked fine. Today I was given the error messages mentioned in this article.
    Despite I love Linux for 1000 reasons I know sometimes problems occur but solutions are near by in most cases. Thanks to the big community and you folks here! Thank you for that.

    —> My solution to get rid of the error: “specified location is not mounted” —>
    smb://computername.local/directory-xy/ —-> I added”.local” to the host computer name. That was all!

    Instead of: smb://computernamel/directory-xy/
    write this to connect: “smb://computername.local/directory-xy/”

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