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possiblylinux127

Programs freeze when 'save as' dialogue box would appear (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/linuxquestions

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Probably the save as box is behind your app. Happens to me in gnome 3 all the time.

Lol jk I didn't see your whole text. Anyway, for those like me who can't be bothered to notice a hidden dialog, here is my solution 😹

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Looks like the network mount is the problem.

Now you need to find out more. You can try setting up a mount outside the VPN network and check if that causes the same problem.

If it does, there is something going wrong with mounting over a network.

If it does not, you can try mounting a different location on the same drive through VPN. If a different folder or location does not cause problems, you know you have to look at the specific location that is causing problems.

If a different location on the same drive still causes problems, it could be your VPN connection causing problems or maybe the drive is failing. Check the drive for errors, and check if your VPN does work properly overall.

This should be a decent start to figuring out where the problem is.

Also make sure to check permissions, since it sounds like the Save as screen is trying to access the location but it does not get the proper response. See if you can access the location in a file explorer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for those suggestions! I'll try them all systematically & report back!

You mention one possibility that the network drive might be failing. That's very interesting, because two similar network drives had hardware failures over the weekend & my work's IT took >3 days to bring them back. That's pretty unusual, I wonder if those events could be connected to my issue?

[–] possiblylinux127 1 points 11 months ago

Its possible but I would leave backend troubleshooting to your IT department

[–] possiblylinux127 1 points 11 months 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