Uploading or attaching files that located on a shared drive doesn't work?

I have this odd, quite minor, but annoying issue that I am quite perplexed about. Whenever I try to upload a file via my browser(let's say attach a file to an email in GMail), I click 'Browse' button and it opens standard file selection dialog, that doesn't show network drives. Further more if I try to drag a file from a network drive into GMail, it doesn't work either, it just doesn't let me do that.

This issue has been around for quite sometime now, and I am just curious if this is something on my side or if it's a bug or a misconfiguration of some sort.

FWIW, I am currently running 10.10, network drive is a samba share on NAS. This happens in FF and Chrome and this is only happens with Samba mounts. As a matter of fact, NFS volumes that are located on the same network operate perfectly fine.


To mount samba shares in our home directory we may use SMBNetFS. With this tool we are able to access samba shares by nearly all applications simply through a mount point in our home directory.

How to use SMBnetFS

  • sudo apt-get install smbnetfs install the package
  • cp /etc/smbnetfs.conf ~/.smb/smbnetfs.conf copy example configuration file
  • cp /etc/samba/smb.conf ~/.smb/smb.conf copy samba configuration
  • mkdir ~/sambashare or any other name for the mount point
  • smbnetfs ~/sambashare to mount the shares.
  • users need to be member of the fuse group

See man smbnetfs for options and go through the FAQ file in /usr/share/doc/smbnetfs for further documentation.