Quick-Launch Network Connections and Shares with ALT-F2

By | 2007/11/08

Quick-connect options for network shares inside gnome can be even easier than using the Places > Connect to Server options. You can also quick-connect to these using the ALT-F2 run dialog. As far as I understand these are interchangable in their features, its just another more flexible way for you to connect to a remote machine or network share.  I’ve tested quite a few of these below and they seem to work just fine.  Are there any others that I have missed?  Here are some examples:

ALT-F2: "ssh://user@host"

ALT-F2: "ssh://user@host:/some/folder"

These will connect and open up nautilus with the contents of that network share. They also work for samba, for the Windows people.

ALT-F2: "smb://servername"

Or if you’d prefer FTP or the more securet SFTP.

ALT-F2: "ftp://hostname"

ALT-F2: "sftp://user@servername:port

…it even supports HTTP(S).

ALT-F2: "http://google.com"

I don’t think loading network connections can get much faster than that. Enjoy. Thanks goes to the Ubuntu Colorado list and David for pointing this out.

8 thoughts on “Quick-Launch Network Connections and Shares with ALT-F2

  1. Yuriy

    For KDE users, replace ssh:// with fish://

    Also, sftp is more akin to ssh than it is to ftp. sftp:// and ssh:// do essentially the same thing.

  2. Big Dan

    Thanks for the tip… I think I’ll delete all those little short guys Nautilus puts on my desktop for my FTP connections. This seems much easier 🙂

  3. Phil

    Most of these can be typed straight into Nautilus’ address line as well.

    If you want to do this sort of thing from the command line, just use gnome-open with the same command as you’d type into the run dialog.

    If you alias it to “o” then you can: “o google.com”.

  4. Abilash

    I have a specific question.

    I can access samba shares using smb://myusername@server/some/folder.
    After this, I enter my password and then I can access our samba share.

    But sometimes, my friends need to login into the samba share using my laptop with their own userID and password. They are not familiar with Ubuntu. So is there any way to create a command/short-cut so that everytime I double-click on it, it will ask for both username and password?

    I hope my question gives all details clearly. If not, plz do ask and post in additional info. Thanks for advance for replies.

  5. Alexei Znamensky

    Although I certainly enjoy the benefits of Linux becoming this user-friendly (Ubuntu rules!!), I am old school Linux, sysadmin, BOFH, accessing a number of remote UNIX boxes on a daily basis, so, as you can expect, I do that old style: in the terminal.

    Nonetheless I gave this command a try, and I found something: it makes no use of my local account ssh config, in the $HOME/.ssh/config file.

    In there, for instance, I configure the usernames for my remote hosts. I also do have a ssh-agent up and running all the time, and the alt-f2 thing (which is actually nautilus, right?) wasn’t able to cope with that, as it seems. Yup, I know it offers to store the password “forever”, which I didn’t test but it’s probably in the gnome-keyring, but I think it should also give the “standard way” a chance too.

    I didn’t dig too much on that issue, so I might be doing something wrong here, sure, but if it’s supposed to be easy, it should take advantage of these configurations, and also of the running ssh-agent.

    Not to mention the ControlMaster connections on the recent SSH releases, which reuses a SSH tunnel to a host to establish other connections as well, but hey, I wouldn’t expect THAT to be ready in nautilus yet.

    Other than that

    just my $0.02

    AZ

  6. Alexei Znamensky

    I didnt end my sentence :-o)

    I was going to say:

    Other than that, it’s a neat way of accessing the remote hosts 🙂 oh, yeah

    😉

Comments are closed.