Connection to NAS

[rustleg]

First a minor unrelated nitpick - not really that - just info for you. I prefer a theme which has a light background but some of them seem to give windows where you can't stretch out the bottom corners - e.g. Firefox and Terminal.

As we corresponded before during testing the beta: I can't connect to a NAS using Windows Share but can connect using "Connect to Server". However all is not well with this. In one case I managed to modify a text file on a subdirectory of the shared folder, but in another case I tried to duplicate a file in Nautilus (Ctrl-C Ctrl-V) and it hung for a while then eventually gave a message headed "Could not display smb//xx~diskstation/dataNAS/". Further detail under this heading was:
Error: DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken. Please select another viewer and try again.

At this point the top bar on the screen had disappeared and the screen was blank apart from the Trash icon, so I had no way of proceeding and had to hit the computer reset button. I think I got to this point some months ago when I was testing the beta but I couldn't remember if there was an easy way to recover.

I tried hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del (old memories!) then whilst making these notes the system shut itself down. After restarting I found there was a file with the heading "xxx Accounts (copy)" so it did create a file on the NAS but this was empty.

I then rebooted, I had to "Connect to server" again to see the NAS. This is a potential problem as it involves putting parameters in to a fairly technical panel and isn't something I'd expect my wife to be able to do.

I then copied my Gnucash data file from the NAS to a local FAT-32 disc on the PC. This opened ok in Gnucash so I modified some data and saved it. On saving Nautilus didn't recognise the change unless I swapped the focus to another folder and back. Then I noticed that I had lost the top screen menu bar again so had to reboot. To do this I tried the Ctrl-Alt-Del routine and eventually it quit again. Next time I'll just wait without hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del to see if the system would quit without me doing anything.

I'd like to be able to use the NAS for read/write as it contains my Gnucash files which I want to use when banking (which is my primary reason for using KNOS). It may of course be down to me not fully specifying the parameters in the "Connect to Server" dialog boxes, but I seemed to get it to work partially as above so maybe this is a red herring.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Just wanted to let you know that I'm on this ... have been waiting for a reply back from the gnome folks. I normally access Windows shares (we don't do that much here anymore) using the "connect to server" item and then just select "Windows share" and toss in the IP address of the machine in question and up it comes. When you select a "folder" then you get a mount of it up on the top of the screen and that can be bookmarked into "places" where all you have to do is click on it again if you save your settings.

We've been working on this since the RC release in order to get it solved for the final release. It's one of many things that have been keeping us quite busy on this end.

One important question though - is that NAS device formatted as "NTFS?" If so, write permissions are not available natively, it requires some custom diddling since we default to "no writing to Windows" in order to not be an infection vector for the poor dears. If it's FAT32, no problem but NTFS won't write. Strange thing about Windows though - if you give it a filename even without write permissions, it will still dutifully write an empty file on its end ... that's why we don't trust writes to Windows drives in our public version given that it allows that to happen to begin with.

Be back to you as soon as I have some answers ...

[Kevin McAleavey]

OK ... we've found the problem in the network browser, it's a bug in gnome that dates back to their 2.26 version and has never been fixed. Amusingly, this bug also affects Apple's OSX. One of my compatriots in China was kind enough to point me to exactly where the problem was and we've fixed it for the KNOS 9 release as of today.

Of course, that won't fix the RC you're currently using, so I've emailed you instructions manually for a tryout that should confirm the fix on our side at least if you're willing to try it. Let me know how it goes!

As for the various themes, we obtained each of them from their various authors and owing to the GPL, had to leave them intact as delivered to us. Sadly, what we included are the best of the best available and each has its own weird little quirks. Although most do not have the familiar "pull tab" in the corner, almost all of them can be resized by finding the edge and watching the cursor change to the diagonal arrow. Once there, you should be able to pull them to any size you wish despite the absence of the corner thingy although some of them want to be pulled up by the top right rather than down from the bottom right as is normally expected. But all of them are adjustable one way or another depending on the quirks of the original creator of the various theme elements

A few of the themes however work unintuitively backwards where the corner pull is available only on the TOP right rather than the bottom as expected. Give it a go, I'll bet you find something you like. You can also choose a theme and then hit "customize" to mix and match elements of various (and there's additionals too!) themes to your satisfaction ...

[rustleg]

Your NAS fix works nicely thanks. Will be even better once the release version allows me to set a persistent bookmark so I don't have to keep using "Connect to Server".

My NAS (Synology Diskstation DS212+) is formatted ext4 which works well. I don't know if they offer NTFS - I believe the underlying system is some variant of Linux (hence the ext4 file system). They have built their own interface although you can in theory get at the underlying OS if you're so minded. I thought its internal OS was irrelevant since it is using the CIFS protocol to talk across the network to attached devices. It also supports NFS but I don't use that (although I don't know what KNOS's "Connect to Server" uses - it just works so I haven't delved deeper). However I only have a vague understanding of this stuff, so I may be misguided.

Re the themes. I usually choose "Clearlooks" which now seems to behave. I looked at customising but it seems unnecessary - I prefer not to fiddle too much but to stay with what is delivered so when I get updated systems I don't have to wonder how I got my usual effects.

Maybe it was the blue-clearlooks I tried - this one doesn't allow the bottom corner to be stretched. Clearlooks is fine - ok it doesn't have the apparent "pull-tab" bit but I never really took notice of that before, I just hover around trying to get the cursor to change.

One thing I've noticed in my Linux systems is that grabbing the corner seems a bit sensitive and when you try to hold down the left button when the cursor has changed it sometimes seems to unhook itself from the corner unless you're very careful. I haven't yet used KNOS enough to see if it is any different - I suspect this is a Gnome thing so I don't expect it to be different.

Anyway all this themes stuff is just fluff not worth you responding to this. And thanks for the support - excellent as usual.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Yeah, no worries on what file system the shares are running on - prior to my getting an answer from one of the people involved in that original design (who never noticed the bug even though it's prominent on OSX but they did a dumber workaround rather than actually fixing it) I was expecting that our refusal to allow write permission on NTFS on LOCAL hard disks in the event that you're running KNOS on Windows or EXT-FS if it's on a Linux machine that our refusal of write permissions was a factor in the problem. Turns out that had nothing to do with it at all.

On "shares" different rules apply since when a file share is configured on the machine that offers the shares, it's up to the person configuring it whether or not to allow writes and obviously on an NAS device, you'd probably want that. At least it can be controlled and thus there was no requirement for KNOS to snub writes if there's actual security control in place on NAS devices. So once I found out what the actual bug was in Gnome's code, it was easy for me to fix. Glad that took care of it - everybody's mystified as to how that single one line of code somehow vanished years ago and nobody noticed. Heh.

As to the themes, not a whole lot we can do about those given that all of them are GPL-licensed and that creates legal issues for us if we were to "fix" them ... FWIW, there are other themes out there although to my mind, we selected the best of what is available. But you CAN download themes, open the theme manager and drag any downloaded "tar.gz" or "bz2" files, drop them right onto the window and they'll install for you. And if you back up your app settings in KNOS, they'll "stick" for you too.

But not a whole lot we can do about those because of the GPL license attached to them ...

[rustleg]

Darn it! I thought the NAS fix was ok until I tried Gnucash. When I open Gnucash without the fix I can use it ok with a data file located on one of the local disks. But if I do your fix (immediately after bootup as instructed, then followed by Connect to Server) I can see the NAS and edit files with gedit which saves ok. But as soon as I open Gnucash the Gnome screen menu bars disappear. If I ignore this and try to open a file on the NAS there is no mention of the NAS in the "places" panel on the left side of the Gnucash "Open" window. I tried to find where the NAS was mounted starting at File System but couldn't find it (I thought it might be under mnt which is where it is in my Linux Mint).

So Gnucash doesn't seem to behave after this fix without me even trying to open a file somewhere.

[Kevin McAleavey]

I'll look into this, I've never actually used Gnucash beyond ensuring that the BSD version of it delivered to us works and comes up. Give me a day or so and I'll see why it's somehow crashing the Gnome panel stuff ... I doubt it has anything to do with the NAS, it's probably some other bug in Gnucash itself ... be back to you on this ...

[Kevin McAleavey]

OK ... followup ... opened, no problem, checked to see if there's any settings within Gnucash that might affect Gnome and no - other than use system theme, nothing in there. Alas, I'm using the fixed version of KNOS now and so those settings are there to begin with for NAS and shares. I somehow suspect that Gnucash is checking system settings and our temporary fix that you've been playing with is insufficient since of course those changes you did in order to test the patch aren't applied "system-wide" owing to our insane levels of security and somehow it's seeing a permissions issue somehow. That's the working theory at the moment.

So I'm going to build a "regression test" build here with that taken back out so I can do what you're doing on your end to see if that's why. I suspect KNOS is tripping over a security violation tripwire and saying "nah-ah" and trashing the menu bar to prevent any further transgressions. So I'll need to get back to you on this - I suspect our fix will solve this but I really need to be sure of my theory. It'll take 6 hours plus to do that test build, so I'll call it a night, let the build machine chug along in my absence and pick back up on this tomorrow once the earlier KNOS build is done for testing.

But I suspect it's a deliberate "stop this" given the temporary hack you're using on your end. KNOS is designed to scream bloody hell and break things if there's a security transgression in order to get people's attention. And since this is a financial application that could someday be compromised, we did design things to stop anything in that quadrant cold rather than letting a security hole sneak by.

But on test with the SMB problem fixed at the system level, it works famously on this latest build I tried it on and everything's a go ... hang in there, should have an answer tomorrow ...

Oh ... one additional thought if you can ... could you describe to me privately step by step what you were doing before it went wobbly so I can be assured of doing exactly the same step by step as the fault you found on this end? No need to make that public. Just want to be sure that I fully reproduce what's happening on your end when I go to test. I just looked at Gnucash bug reports on the Linux platform for this particular issue and didn't see any there, but there's a WAD of bug reports on Gnucash crashing for various and sundry reasons. Google should be amusing to look at if you're bored right now. Heh.