I’m seeing programs freeze when I start any operation that would open a ‘save as’ dialogue box. The behavior is happening with all programs and started suddenly last week.

I’ve been able to trace the problem to a mounted SMB network drive that I access through a VPN. I have the mount specified in /etc/fstab. If I manually unmount (sudo umount -l /path/to/mount/) then all of these ‘save as’ freezes go away, and programs which appeared frozen suddenly come back to life. But if I remount (sudo mount -a) then the freezes return when I try to save anything.

So I have a workaround solution (unmount whenever saving, remount to continue working), but I’m at a loss for how to fix this more permanently. Weird that it began all of a sudden like this, everything used to be fine. I’ve tried updating and that hasn’t helped. Any thoughts are much appreciated!

OS: Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS x86_64

Kernel: 6.2.0-36-generic

DE: GNOME 42.9

WM: Mutter

  • Possibly linuxMEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    As a rule of thumb, you shouldn’t use SMB over a VPN. It is designed for a local network and falls apart with high latency. This can even lead to corruption in some cases.

    I would recommend setting up a Nextcloud instance. As nextcloud is designed for remote access via a web browser and gnome supports nextcloud natively. Its probably overkill for what your doing but it will be more reliable