Recently, many have told me that they followed my tutorials on file sharing between Windows and Ubuntu and they still couldn’t get Ubuntu to access Windows shares. Even though they followed the tutorial to the letter, they still got ‘Failed to retrieve share list from server’ every time. This brief tutorial will show you how to fix the issue when you come across it in Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin).
To read our recent tutorial on file sharing between Windows and Ubuntu, click here.
Objectives:
- Fix the error ‘failed to retrieve share list from server’ in Ubuntu 12.04 / 11.10
- Enjoy!
To get started, press Ctrl – Alt – T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the commands below to open samba configuration file.
sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf
Finally, scroll down a bit in the file and find : WORKGROUP = Workgroup_Name. Right below that, type the line shown below and save the file.
name resolve order = bcast host
Restart your computer and try again. I hope it works for you.
Enjoy!
Thank you thank you thank you! This tutorial and the one on setting up Windows shares in Linux Mint totally got my networking, umm, working. I was tearing my hair out slogging through dry, wordy Wikis and ridiculous”[SOLVED]” forum postings with enough lines of code to launch the space shuttle, and getting NOWHERE. I was ready to give up on Linux as crowdsourced chaos. THIS is what Linux tutorials should be like! Who knew a Liberian Geek could do it better than all those American geeks out there? Gotta love the connected world! BTW I’m making a donation by PAYPAL ASAP to support your awesome work!
Thanx!!
A million trillion thanks !!! Worked great for LinuxMint 14. Average speeds of 5 MB/s plus, what a relief! Now I can access my NAS drive better.
Does not work for me
Many thanks mate, it worked a treat !
I got that same error but found an easier solution (I think).
I logged in to the router as admin, refreshed “attached devices” and while logged in tried to access the network share.
After doing it that way once, the problem was gone forever.
How that worked? No idea.
Works for Raspberry Pi running Wheezy as well. Thanks!
Nice information, works like a charm!
This did not work followed to the letter did nothing!
Wow. Over a year I tried and given up many times.
First instruction to allow my Ubuntu and Linux Mint 12 to connect to my Windows XP Pro compaq notebook.
Didn’t even need to reboot my Linux Mint workstation after the smb.conf edit.
Changed the workgroup name on XP and rebooted and voila, the external 3tb usb drive with shared folder shows up and can videos and all files play across the wifi lan.
Kudos to you!
17 May 20
Had this issue after some Ubuntu 12.04 updates. The above, brought back my Windows shares.Thanks!
Thankyou! After a lot of searching for a solution this enabled my Ubuntu system to access a USB drive attached to a Homehub V1. Genius!