I’m transferring a large file from my Vista desktop to my Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx) laptop. My wireless connection keeps going in and out. When my connection goes out during a file transfer, I can’t do anything to restart it. It just hangs there. I tried restarting Nautilus, but that doesn’t work. I have to reboot after every network drop. Any help?
OK, so I don’t have a direct answer/suggestion, as I haven’t experienced this issue. It sounds like something (nautilus?) isn’t timing out in a usable/user-friendly way. Since rebooting to fix things like this is abhorrent, some (kludgy) things you might try as workarounds:
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Kill the nautilus process (I assume by “restarting”, you mean “close the window” or “click ‘File -> Quit’”). While I’m pretty sure there’s a GUI for process control, I (generally) prefer and am familiar with the command-line – use ps, piped to grep nautilus to get the process ID, then kill it. Note that this won’t resolve any persistent network issue, so nautilus may still freeze when restarted.
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You could also specifically restart the interface. One way to do this (again, from the command-line) is to use the ifup and ifdown commands. First, use the ifconfig command to determine the interface name (likely eth1 or wlan0). Then, type sudo ifdown <iface> to disable the network interface, which should cause nautilus to error and (hopefully) unfreeze. Don’t forget to sudo ifup <iface> to re-enable the network interface.
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You could use a different program to do your copying, especially if you have sshd running. In particular, someone here on the dope pointed me to Filezilla, with which I’ve become quite enamoured – the fact that it’s multi-platform encouraged me to make it the standard in our office for remote transfers (replacing WinSCP on Windows machines). It also has cumulative restarts for interrupted transfers, which becomes necessary for large transfers over a flaky connection. Basically, Filezilla has become one of the three tools I use for copying files: Filezilla for multiple files located across the file system, rsync for bulk transfers and backup, and scp (often combined with tar) for single files or files in a single location. In your case, run it from your Vista machine, connecting to Ubuntu as the remote machine.
Of course, there must be more. But if you have any more specific questions about any of the above, ask away. However, it would be nice to know what the root cause of your specific issue is and how to resolve it, so if you find out more, please follow up.
I just realized my question was a bit ambiguous. I meant to say I can’t restart the file transfer after the connection drops. I connect back to the network just fine. But I can’t connect to my shared folders on my desktop. And the file copying window just freezes up.
I tried using system - administration - system monitor to kill Nautilus. That didn’t work.
I can’t connect to the shared folder. I get the following error:
I also can’t unmount the shared folders from the Ubuntu desktop. I get the following error:
I’ve used Filezilla before on my Windows machine, I might give that a go.
Ah, so the problem is partial file transfers and/or re-establishing shared folders. Again, I’ve not experienced the problem – I avoid Windows when possible – but now I’d guess it’s a samba issue. Perhaps you might want to try restarting samba? (Typing sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart should do it.)
If it’s a samba filesystem thing, using Filezilla would avoid the issue, so that’s good. Furthermore, if the issue is simply restarting interrupted transfers, it’ll also work. Please let me know what you find out, for my own edification. 
I got “command not found” when I try to restart samba. So I took a look in the init.d directory and there’s no samba to be found. Is that installed by default in Ubuntu? I’m not very familiar with Linux.
I can’t seem to connect to my Filezilla server, I think I need to configure my router to allow port forwarding. All try that tomorrow.
Thanks for the help.
OK, my apologies – I was wrong about restarting samba. For details, continue reading; if it’s not that important, skip to the next quoted bit.
I knew I should’ve fired up my 10.04 laptop and checked before posting. Now that I have, I see that samba setup has changed – I swear it was like that in 8.04 (I just recently upgraded my laptop) and it’s still like that on my Debian desktop.
And I should also say that the reason I suspected samba is/was involved was due to the smb://j/shared videos message (the smb:// indicates a samba mount point). But now that I pay more attention, the message indicates the videos reside on your Vista machine – which means the samba client is being used from Ubuntu, which means that the samba daemon isn’t an issue here, which means that there’s nothing to restart.
Again, my apologies for all that. Before posting much more, and to avoid wasting more time/effort, let me know how the following goes:
That may be; and does Vista’s security block outbound traffic? Also, make sure you have sshd running on the Ubuntu machine – I can’t remember whether it’s installed by default, and at least one distro I’ve installed only had the client installed by default.
Do this: sudo ps -ef | grep sshd to establish whether the process exists (one way of doing it; you might also install bum – that’s Boot Up Manager – to view/control your startup services via a GUI). If the SSH daemon is not running, install it (via synaptic or another package manager, or just sudo apt-get install openssh-server from a command line). Then, in Filezilla, set the Server Type to “SFTP” (SSH File Transfer Protocol). I use Ask for password, and since I never bother to fill in the port, I guess it just accepts and uses the default (22).
No worries. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d still say the issue lies with Windows networking (i.e., samba). At the office, we sometimes have similar issues just between Windows and/or Windows/Mac machines (e.g., a router/switch needs resetting and afterwards the computers don’t see one another until rebooted; the Mac/Linux machine combinations are always fine, though).
Lending a helping hand is my primary motivation. But, as I said, I find rebooting to resolve these issues abhorrent (curse you, MicroSoft, for making that acceptable!) and that’s too often the recommended solution. So I’m very curious about locating and resolving the root source of the issue as an additional benefit.