KDEConnect

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1

Hi folks, I need a way to quickly transfer files to my phone. After much trials, I installed KDEconnect. It works… sort of! Drag-dropping a file in Dolphin takes FOREVER and renders the pc useless whilst doing it! For instance, downloading a 3 hour radio show from t’interwebs takes less than two minutes… sending it to my phone takes approx an hour !! This can’t be right surely? Does KDE connect work well for others? If not is there a better way to load my phone with radio goodness without occupying my PC’s (and my) whole life?
I guess I could take the SD card out of the phone and put it in a card reader. But that seems prehistoric!

My phone is currently not ‘rooted’ but I guess I could do that and then…

ssh or something ‘techy’ ??

I tried using cli and cp the files. Which sort of worked, but slowly and with no ‘progress reports’
I also tried grsync, but it did not ‘see’ the target/destination folders.

2

KDE Connect works well here, but file transfer may not be the best use case. It is a bit slow for bigger jobs. I use FTP or ssh for that. May be somthing else going on, so best wait for more qualified ‘technical’ advice.

3

did you maybe use bluetooth instead of wifi for the connection
what’s your wifi protocol are you using the old 802.11b even that at 11Mbps shuldn’t take hours

rooting has no effect on kdeconnect

4

I have only used KDE Connect with a USB cable connection, and it worked fine.

There is also a “KDE Connect” app for Android.

5

many thanks, I confirm the slow kdeconnect in transfer file with dolphin, …I thought the guilty was dolphin becouse the slow was during the selection of many files to transfere and when I drag the many files and drop on a dolphin tab, it takes a lot of time to show the popup window “copy here or move here or link here”, so I’ll continue to use ftpserver

6

I’m on LEAP and KdeConnect is extremely fast I get full wi-fi speeds (~300MBps) which is a lot faster then my internet
I have noticed sometimes my android wifi speeds slow down to a crawl this is usually fixed by turning Wi-Fi off and on again, I see no real reason for slow speeds
it might be wifi protocol limitation if you have a lot of wifi devices the wifi protocol allows for only a single device to be using the wireless network at a time CSMA/CA
another possibility is you are using a wireless connection for your PC with a different protocol then your android 802.11n with 802.11b so you get a bottleneck issue
I’d see what protocols your router and PC support and if they do support the newer n standard switching to it, another thing would be to turn off then on your phone’s wifi and see if that helps

I really don’t think you can use kdeconnect with a wired connection but you can connect your android as a usb storage or a media device with a usb cable and get full usb 2.0 speeds (it should appear as a media/usb device depending on the protocol used) a media device should be preferred as usb storage locks your phone storage while it is connected
you did allow the kdeconnect service in opensuse’s firewall?
seeing how you’re on TW this might be a newr regression bug if the above does not help ask on kde’s forums maybe open a bug report
https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=225
https://bugs.kde.org

7

I get fast file transfers to my phone over wifi (usually a music album in ogg format - about 120MB takes about twenty seconds).
However, file transfer can be a little flaky and sometimes I need to restart Plasma to get things working correctly.
This is in leap 42.3

8

I’m having a slight love-hate relationship with KDE Connect lately [multiple weeks, if not a few months]. The following fault continues irrespective of keeping TW on both Tower & Lappy up to date, & irrespective of reboots.
[ol]
[li]After pairing Tower & Lappy, i cannot see one from the other in Dolphin [ie, it’s not like when plugging in a USB stick, for which Dolphin immediately shows the new device in its LHS Panel under “Devices”].[/li][li]I can, however, right-click on a candidate file in one PC’s Dolphin & then select “Send to …[the other pc] via KDE Connect”.[/li][li]When i do #2 on Lappy, the file transfer to Tower’s designated directory initiates & completes very fast. This is just marvellous; i love it.[/li][li]When i do #2 on Tower, the file transfer dialog appears on Lappy & seems superficially to complete the process, but it actually hangs… no file transfer occurs in fact… but a 0 B “placeholder” file instead appears in Lappy’s designated directory, with “.part” appended. See pic below for example.[/li][li]Firewall on both PCs has KDE Connect allowed.[/li][/ol]

As i said, love-hate.

9
  1. When i do #2 on Tower, the file transfer dialog appears on Lappy & seems
    superficially to complete the process, but it actually hangs… no file transfer occurs in fact… but a 0 B “placeholder” file instead appears in Lappy’s designated directory, with “.part” appended. See pic below for example.> 1. Firewall on both PCs has KDE Connect allowed.

I’ve never tried using KDE Connect (and it wouldn’t be my first choice for inter-KDE/Linux file sharing anyway), but it would be interesting to know if the firewall configuration is correct/complete here. I note from a quick read of the KDE Connect guide that “KDE Connect uses dynamic ports in the range 1714-1764 for UDP and TCP”. A quick test might be to stop the firewall on the laptop temporarily and see if the file transfer process behaves better. Just a thought.

10

Ta deano. Yes i know that wiki; have read it many times over the months looking for some hint explaining this problem. Well, now, your mentioning

know if the firewall configuration is correct/complete here
triggered me to spend the past hour fiddling with the TW FW settings on both pc’s, & right now i have managed to get KDE Connect to fully work bidirectionally at last… BUT… i am slightly anxious that i might now have stupid FW settings that have exposed one, other or both PC’s ports unwisely to the world. My results also seem to be unintuitive & self-contradictory, IMO.

On both PC’s, irrespective of any FW settings i changed [incredibly [i]including even with the FW purportedly off] the Gibson Shields Up site gave this same result:

https://s17.postimg.org/erj5yxxfz/20171119_004.png
https://postimg.org/image/n8ioa4x2j/

I cannot comprehend this repeatability independent of my FW settings, leading me to suspect:

  1. Shields Up is not to be believed, or
  2. My interpretation of Shields Up is wrong, or
  3. The TW FW is not actually really changing its settings when i tell it to, including when i use the option "Save Settings & Restart Firewall Now
    ", or 1. I am supposed to reboot my PC’s after editing the FW settings, despite the FW GUI implying that the changes take effect immediately
    .

Initially [with KDE Connect being only uni-directional per my earlier post], both PC’s FWs were at default settings, except as mentioned that i had allowed the KDE Connect Service ports [per that wiki]. Said default settings means that each PC’s network interface was NOT assigned to ANY zone [a situation that had puzzled me ever since i began using TW].

So today i then made this the new setting on Lappy:

https://s17.postimg.org/589h60ztb/20171119_005.png

To my amazement Tower’s KDEC then could successfully send files.

I thought i should then make the same setting on Tower, but KDE Connect remained uni-directional. So then i did the opposite zone allocation:

https://s17.postimg.org/q3vrh7j4v/20171119_003.png

…after which KDEC became nicely bidirectional.

Does this make any sense? Are those respective FW settings “good” or dangerous, pls?

POSTSCRIPT: I began preparing this post several hours ago [on Tower, but with Lappy next to me]. Partway through the writing, whilst back in Lappy’s YaST FW settings, Lappy suddenly became severely laggy to all inputs, & cpu went to 99%. Whilst i could not get to see what was eating the cpu, i know that it was not the btrfs maintenance [balancing] cron job, as that runs on Tuesday nights & it’s my Sunday afternoon now]. Eventually with no improvement i had to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the session, but that did not help as once logged in again it was still overloaded. I tried to reboot but it was ignored. I REISUB’d, & thereafter discovered the extent of the apparent disaster. I can boot, “apparently” unlock my encrypted /home at the screen for that as usual, but then cannot actually login to my Plasma or IceWM desktop anymore, as me or my other user. I tried multiple Snapper Rollbacks, but all gave no change to the preceding symptoms. I rebooted from Live media then ran

sudo btrfs check --repair /dev/sda3

as previously worked for me in Tower [https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/527390-BtrFS-has-gone-ReadOnly-again?p=2840121#post2840121], but all the preceding symptoms [boot, “decrypt & mount”, login just bounces back to login screen] continued. I shall soon make a dedicated thread for this, but wow, never did i suspect that making KDE Connect bidirectional result in “destroying” my Lappy TW <<sarcasm>>

11

did you open the ports on your router (which acts as a hardware firewall)?
there is no need for that as your devices are on the same network
I just did the gibson test with my software firewall completely off and got
THE EQUIPMENT AT THE TARGET IP ADDRESS
**DID NOT RESPOND TO OUR UPnP PROBES!

**
(I have no idea how to disable the advanced paste on these forums I’m too lazy to filter them in a text editor)

12

Your local network hosts should all be behind a firewall. It is usual that the router connecting to the internet fulfils this role.

On both PC’s, irrespective of any FW settings i changed [incredibly [i]including even with the FW purportedly off] the Gibson Shields Up site gave this same result:

I’m not surprised by these findngs. Your internet-facing router should determine what is exposed to the outside world.

13

Many thanks. No i have not touched my modem-router in this context. When i run that same test as you, i get the same result as you, but that’s not the one i’m interested in & did earlier]. The one to do is the green-indicated one:

https://s17.postimg.org/q1gh7pcgf/20171119_006.png

14

Thanks. Not that it currently matters anymore on my dead Lappy, but at least for my Tower i’d still like to know whether my network interface should be unassigned [per default settings], or Internal, or External in the TW FW zones? I find this confusing.

15

The firewall is designed to protect against unsolicited traffic arriving from the outside world. Interfaces in the external zone are those that need to be protected via the firewall.

https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/security/html/book.security/cha.security.firewall.html

SuSEFirewall2 is a script that reads the variables set in    /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2 to generate a    set of iptables rules. It defines three security zones, although only the    first and the second one are considered in the following sample    configuration:

External Zone Given that there is no way to control what is happening on the external network, the host needs to be protected from it. Usually, the external network is the Internet, but it could be another insecure network, such as a Wi-Fi.
Internal Zone This refers to the private network, usually the LAN. If the hosts on this network use IP addresses from the private range (see Book “Reference”, Chapter 13 “Basic Networking”, Section 13.1.2 “Netmasks and Routing”), enable network address translation (NAT), so hosts on the internal network can access the external one. All ports are open in the internal zone. The main benefit of putting interfaces into the internal zone (rather than stopping the firewall) is that the firewall still runs, so when you add new interfaces, they will be put into the external zone by default. That way an interface is not accidentally “open” by default.
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) While hosts located in this zone can be reached both from the external and the internal network, they cannot access the internal network themselves. This setup can be used to put an additional line of defense in front of the internal network, because the DMZ systems are isolated from the internal network.

By default, all network interfaces are set to no zone assigned. This mode behaves as the External Zone profile.

16

Oh, excellent, thanks. I’ve now returned it to this, which is how it was before i begun blundering along:

https://s17.postimg.org/sdt2jdej3/20171119_007.png

17

I’m currently on my win7 rig I disabled my firewall and redid the test
https://i.imgur.com/SFwzppj.png

I dobth windows’s security I’m guessing your router might have all it’s ports open I do remember opening a few ports so I could get a few p2p apps working properly

18

Thanks for doing it, but with respect i fear a misunderstanding. Your result is actually much worse than mine. In order of increasing desirability, Open < Closed < Stealth. All green is the ideal target.

19

Going back to the original problem, a very effective alternative to all this for transferring files from PC to phone, if the PC is on the same LAN as the phone, is to install the app “wifi transfer transfer” (from smarterDroid) on the phone. When run this provides an IP address which you access from any browser on the PC. It enables you to select and copy files in either direction. I use Android but i expect there’s an Apple version too. The app is free but to transfer large files you need the paid “pro” version.

20

the original problem being slow speeds with kdeconnect
fixes for which we wore discussing ie opening extra ports on the Linux firewall and smarterdroid has nothing to do with the above discussion
kdeconnect is a kde project and exists as both a linux app part of the kde applications for the plasma desktop and is on both the google play store and the f-droid open source store
as the OP hasn’t commented in a while I guess his issue was resolved one way or another