I recently upgraded my Kubuntu 18.04 LTS to 20.04 LTS, and one difference I notice is that the Kubuntu system can no longer see the Windows PCs on the local network.

I'm no Linux expert (which is why I'm posting in this sub-forum), but I do vaguely remember reading sometime in the last year or two about some protocol getting disabled/deprecated (SMB1 ?), a change that may be a factor in this. I've searched around the Web for up-to-date info on networking Windows and Linux computers, but I have found very little dating from the last year or so.

Up until the upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04, the Kubuntu machine could (most of the time) see the Windows Workgroup and access the shared folders on the PCs in the workgroup. But not any more. FWIW, please note that two Windows 7 systems DO see the Kubuntu system and can access its shared folders, but a third Win7 machine and a Win10 machine don't see it.

How can I get Kubuntu once again to see the Windows computers on the LAN?

Thanks in advance for any tips or info on how to get this to work.

Add the above lines to your /etc/samba/smb.conf file global section and restart samba. If you still can not see the Windows PCs make sure that avahi is running. On the third W7 PC make sure your not using homegroups and that it is configured to the same workgroup as the Kubuntu PC.

It depends on what W10 version you are running but one of the updates disabled SMB V1. Now W10 uses Windows Discovery protocol instead of netbios to find other computers. There is a python script called wsdd that enables Windows PCs to "see" samba hosts.

https://github.com/christgau/wsdd

Thanks for the quick reply!

I had not heard of avahi before. I searched for it in Discover and there are several results, including (in the order they're given):

Avahi Zeroconf Browser
Avahi SSH Server Browser
Avahi VNC Server Browser
avahi
avahi-client

Should I install the first one of these?

Regarding the other parts of your reply, I added those two NT1 lines to smb.conf and restarted Samba, but Kubuntu still isn't seeing the the Windows PCs. None of the Windows PCs is on a Homegroup, and they're all configured to be in the same workgroup.

I'll check out wsdd.

What do you mean by "see"?

Can you ping the Windows machines?

What are you trying to do, exactly?

Typically "see" is the PC is displayed in the file browser network.

avahi-daemon, I thought it was installed by default.

I just installed Kubuntu 20 as a VM. I did modify the smb.conf file as posted. dolphin can see all of my samba shares including an old SMB V1 router share.

I installed wsdd as per the instructions for debian / ubuntu and I can "see" Kubuntu in the Windows 10 file browser.

Yes, as @michaelk wrote, by "seeing" I mean seeing the listings for the shared folders of the Windows computers under Network in the KDE file manager, Dolphin.

What I would like to do is, for each computer on the network, to be able to see every other computer's shared folder, so that I can copy and move files between them just as if I were doing these operations within that computer. Currently, I can do this with the Windows PCs on the network, and even some of those PCs can already see the Kubuntu computer -- but the Kubuntu computer can't see any of the Windows PCs.

To give a little more detail, here's what's happening: if I open Dolphin and click on Network in the navigation (left) panel, several choices show up in the right panel, including:

Bluetooth
Google Drive
MTP Devices
Network
Shared Folders (SMB)
Add Network Folder

(Some of these items must be showing up by default regardless: For example, there are no Bluetooth devices in use and I don't have a Google account.)

As I said in my original post, I'm far from a Linux expert, so it's not clear to me why there are both a "Network" item AND a "Shared Folders (SMB)" item, but the one I'm interested in is the "Shared Folders (SMB)" item since in the past that's where I've been able to reach the Windows workgroup to see the Windows PCs and do things on them. (Clicking on Network shows a printer.) But now, when clicking on Shared Folders (SMB), I'm getting an error message saying:

I did read somewhere that the part about an enabled firewall is misleading.

Finally, yes, I can ping the Windows machines on the network.

Hope this helps, thanks.

OK, I installed avahi-daemon. But I'm still getting that error message about finding no workgroups. Do I need to reboot, or to restart something?

Just to verify the error message is from dolphin? Never mind I did not see read both posts carefully...

To verify you can access an individual PC use the smbclient utility

smbclient -L IP_address

Press enter at the password prompt. All browesable shares should be displayed.

smbclient may not be installed.

I've made a little progress: https://askubuntu.com/questions/8758...rking-together

After entering the following command in Konsole, the Workgroup is finally showing up and listing the Windows PCs:

However, I still can't actually see the contents of any shared folders in those computers. Some are asking for a password (which is not set up) and others just keep "Loading folder" without ever reaching a conclusion.

Hopefully, though, this will help guide toward a solution.

samba ports
137 UDP
138 UDP
139 TCP
445 TCP

If it is a firewall issue you need rules for the other ports.

OK, I tried this on one of the Windows 7 PCs and it showed me the drives on it. However, after that there was the following output (substituting "x" for the actual address):

So, putting this together with the info in my previous post, it looks like Kubuntu can now find a workgroup but also thinks there isn't a workgroup!

Verify the firewall is allowing the other ports. We are a bit out of sync...

Thanks, but I'm not sure what to do with the above? GUFW shows the following two lines:

As a test I enabled the firewall and added samba rules. My GUFW actually shows

137,138/udp ALLOW IN anywhere
139,445/tcp ALLOW IN anywhere
137,138/udp ALLOW IN anywhere (v6)
139,445/tcp ALLOW IN anywhere (v6)

Not sure why I got a similar connection error at first but trying it again everything worked. See what happens when you turn the firewall off.

I disabled the firewall via GUFW, then tried to browse the shared folders via Dolphin as before: there was no difference!

Also added the UDP and TCP rules. There's no improvement.