1

This may (or may not) be related to this bug.

General description (synopsis)

When I open the Dropbox folder using the icon located in the Unity Panel, nautilus crashes and my desktop icons disappear.

Ubuntu 17.04, arc-dark theme (however, it happens even after it is removed, so I doubt it's related). Dropbox installed using sudo apt install nautilus-dropbox.

Detailed description

  1. Restart machine.

  2. Click on "open Dropbox folder" in the dropdown menu extended from the icon in the Panel.

  3. Nautilus crashes (+ desktop icons disappear, obviously).

  4. Trying to restart Nautilus does not work until I pkill nautilus and restart it, and get this:

    $ Initializing nautilus-dropbox 2015.10.28
    Nautilus-Share-Message: Called "net usershare info" but it failed: 'net usershare' returned error 255: mkdir failed on directory /var/run/samba/msg.lock: Permission denied
    net usershare: cannot open usershare directory /var/lib/samba/usershares. Error No such file or directory
    Please ask your system administrator to enable user sharing.
    
  5. After a while, I also get this (repeating every 30 seconds or so).

    Unable to monitor entire Dropbox folder hierarchy.  
    Please run "echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p"   
    and restart Dropbox to fix the problem. 
    
  6. Quitting Dropbox and restarting also gives me this:

    ~$ dropbox start
    Starting Dropbox...Done!
    ~$ Nautilus-Share-Message: Called "net usershare info" but it 
    failed: 'net usershare' returned error 255: mkdir failed on directory /var/run/samba/msg.lock: Permission denied
    net usershare: cannot open usershare directory /var/lib/samba/usershares. Error No such file or directory 
    Please ask your system administrator to enable user sharing.
    

Edit:
So far I tried all the usual suspects, restarting, reinstalling Dropbox etc (and also echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p)

5
  • Did you "echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p" and restart Dropbox?
    – heynnema
    Aug 11, 2017 at 18:00
  • I did :) Thanks, but the problem still persists.
    – liorr
    Aug 11, 2017 at 22:35
  • Did you reboot?
    – heynnema
    Aug 12, 2017 at 2:30
  • Yes, I did reboot.
    – liorr
    Aug 12, 2017 at 4:27
  • Lets check your file system. Please see my answer and report back.
    – heynnema
    Aug 12, 2017 at 12:47

1 Answer 1

0

Lets first check your file system for errors.

To check the file system on your Ubuntu partition...

  • boot to the GRUB menu
  • choose Advanced Options
  • choose Recovery mode
  • choose Root access
  • at the # prompt, type sudo fsck -f /
  • repeat the fsck command if there were errors
  • type reboot
2
  • Thanks, I tried what you suggested. There were not errors, and it did not resolve the problem.
    – liorr
    Aug 13, 2017 at 5:06
  • The only other thing that I can advise is to make sure that you have a backup of the files that were/are in your Dropbox folder (you may have to do this from another computer, or via the Dropbox web page), delete the Dropbox folder, re-create a Dropbox folder, use the Dropbox prefs to point at the new folder, and let it re-sync. Report back.
    – heynnema
    Aug 13, 2017 at 8:31

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