Ubuntu – Nautilus-Share-Message: Called “net usershare info” but it failed

16.04gnomenautilussamba

When I run Nautilus from command line, it starts successfully but this appears in the terminal:

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.

Should I really ask my system administrator to enable user sharing?
My administrator is myself, and I don't use Samba.

Is this message the sign of bigger problems with my Ubuntu?
If not, how can I prevent it from appearing? (Nautilus is launched by a program I am beta-testing but can't modify, and the present problem makes this program's errors less visible in the terminal)

Best Answer

Nautilus uses the net usershare info command to get information about non-root user defined Samba shares. See the net manpage for more about this command.

If that command fails Nautilus assumes there are no such shares and displays the error message it got just in case you want it.

Creating the folder /var/lib/samba/usershares/ should prevent the message from appearing:

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/samba/usershares/
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