Hello,
I’m using TW KDE and like to access a shared folder on a W11 Pro PC. I’m able to do that from other W11 PCs.
From the Tutorials 21.7 I found the Windows Domain tool. That tool kind of looks like it shoudl get me into my Windows Domain. Suse installs a lot of add-ins. After that I got to the point where I enter a username and password . But I get the error below:
Am I following the wrong tutorial? what should i do? In Windows at some point I can navigate to the shared folder, and then enter the Windows login credentials. I expected to come to a similar part here.
And my ultimate objective is, to be able to access the Windows folder, and back it up to the Suse PC. For that I would use Free File sync (mirror, one-way sync). But that needs to have the W11 folder mounted first. And I hoped this domain access would do that.
And I found threads from 2016 about accessing shared Windows folders. But those didn’t reference this YaST. And I hope this is a convenient tool to use.
Are your Windows machines really domain-joined, or are you simply accessing as a standalone share (as I suspect is the case)?
While you could mount the share, with KDE Dolphin it is possible to access the share on the fly via the navigation bar with something likesmb://<IP_address>/<sharename>. From a terminal you can use smbclientin a similar fashion: smbclient -U <username> //IP_address/<sharename>
Enter the credentials when prompted.
If you want to mount the share as a user, then smb4k is your friend:
The YaST utility can be used for system-wide mounting, but you can do this yourself by hand if required. Otherwise this may be of value to you:
Thanks. I will try that out. and i need to clarify, this is just a standalone share. i just enabled “share” on the W11 PC.
i can find the IP address. In your code, what is the “sharename” and the “username”? is that the (Windows) computer name and use name?
In windows I click on the computername, and then on the shared folders, where it asks me for Windows-username and password. i suspect i will need to enter the same here.
For some reason on all distros i tested tha tuse Dolphin, i was able to access the shared folder exactly like in Windows Explorer. BUT all of them then crashed. but here on this Suse installation, Dolphin doesn’t see it (and also doesn’t crash). Do i need to do something with the firewall?
You say this also can be done in YaST. How would that be done?
As suspected, hence any reference that you made about domains is irrelevant here.
The sharename is the folder that is shared, and the username relates is the account that was created for you on the server. For a simple share at home, it may be the same username and password that you normally use to log into that computer. In any case the same credentials as you use to access the share via the other Windows PCs.
Dolphin makes use of WS-Discovery for discovering Windows samba servers (assuming they are configured to advertise them), so if you have an active firewall, allow that service in the firewall. You can use the firewall-cmd command, or if you prefer a graphical tool, use firewall-config. You may need to install the package of the same name first.
Did you check out Smb4K yet? That provides a nice GUI to get your shares mounted as a user. See this discussion about it…
Thanks for your help. It is getting closer.
After disabling the firewall, Dolphin now shows the shared folder. But Smb4K couldn’t see it when scanning. And I may enter the wrong data in the Mount Dialog
Dolphin can discover samba hosts using WS-Discovery for Windows servers, and Avahi for Linux samba servers. The Smb4K utility relies on what libsmbclient exposes, (which means it mostly uses NetBIOS/SMB1-style browsing which is long since deprecated). For modern samba environments you can manually add hosts/shares.
To get the share defined in smb4k, you could mount it manually the first time like this mkdir -p ~/smb4k/Data sudo mount //mothership.local/Data/ ~/smb4k/Data -o username=****,password=****
Once the share is mounted, it should appear in the Smb4K “Mounted Shares” page. Right-click on the share icon and select “Add Bookmark”. After that this share will show up in the Bookmarks, and you can set it to “Always remount this share” if desired.
Thanks so much for your help. I appreciate it. I will try more of what you suggested.
However, I have some crashes of the “Discover” tool, and the KDE Plasma environment and maybe have to re-install or or use the snapper. Just so you know if I don’t respond with results immediately
