18.04: Bionic Beaver: nautilus-connect-server: GONE?! Workaround?

Question

I happen to be working as a system admin, and I was so happy setting a shortcut key to nautilus-connect-server command, allowing me to bring up the "Connect to server" dialogue box with one function-key press.

Now, the shell command is not found, and when you click on the 18.04 LTS link top of this http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/en/man1/nautilus-connect-server.1.html page, you are forcibly redirected to Xenial (16.04 LTS)!

Although Nautilus is keeping the functionality (in a limited form), but the command line is gone.

Any native and secure workaround/alternative?

Solution 1

No hope here, the closest thing is use CTRL+L in Nautilus and type down the target URI (like smb://PC/share). That is the closest experience there is to get!

Solution 2

An easy way to connect to server is to install nemo. Nemo is very similar to Nautilus and allows you to explore your files and connect to server. You can install nemo with the common apt:

sudo apt install nemo

Then, you can go to menu file, Connect to Server and then you will see this:

Nautilus: If you still want to connect using nautilus, you can normally do it. When connecting to a server in Nemo, it automatically appears in Nautilus.

Nemo also allows you to add bookmarks to your server connections with the name you desire (in this case MyBookmark). Then, the next time you want to connect you can simply select the bookmark. If you create it in nemo it automatically appears in nautilus as well.

Solution 3

To connect remotely to macOS I hit ctrl-L in nautilus and enter:

sftp://[email protected]/Users/daniel

At this point one can right-click and create a bookmark out of the location.

---

To open Nautilus at this location directly from the terminal:

$ nautilus sftp://[email protected]/Users/daniel

I'm not into samba.

Comments

[Broadsworde]

would you not want to connect directly from the Terminal? e.g. ssh [user]@[host]

[M K]

@Broadsworde: no, I use it for file/folder browsing and copying, and it is very handy that way. Works all the way for all protocols, specially with SMB shares.

[Broadsworde]

ssh is far more secure than smb, and you effectively become a user on the remote machine... browse, copy, delete, create as you like. But if SMB is your preferred method you can do so like this: help.ubuntu.com/community/…!

[M K]

@Broadsworde: What if all my sheep are of Satya's? :D No, I can't use SSH, I'm the lonely wolf here (escaped Satya's corrupted dreams of an OS more than a year ago). Also, smbclient is good for listing, not very useful for browsing; you need quick visual assessment of a user PC and that is not as quickly provided with smbclient. Nevertheless, I settled for the closest method, which I will accept as answer!

[M K]

@Broadsworde: One more thing about smbclient, it works inside a terminal. You cannot just as simply copy/paste in a terminal. And you wouldn't handle mounting/unmounting smb shares for each user you have on the network just for the sake of some copy/paste! Overkill! I would rather die than to do it on daily basis and for each and every one of them. Scripting it, too, would be too much of a waste.

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

It's like Captain Nemo takes control over Nautilus :)

[Adriaan]

I don't think this works. When I try Ctrl+L and enter ssh://user@host:port/dir I get the message Oops! Something went wrong. Unhandled error message: Connection failed..

[Adriaan]

@Sheila. Is this perhaps because Nemo is using sshfs under the hood? Is this perhaps a good alternative to nautilus ssh://user@host:port/dir?

[M K]

@Sheila Although I already use nemo (even on KDE) and that nemo's approach to address bar is way better than nautilus, but your answer missed the original target of my question: I connect to SMB servers, not *nix ones.

[matanster]

works like a charm