Samba Network Device Type for Windows 10

English Network/Internet
1

My Samba share is working for all my devices tested with Linux, Apple, Android and Windows 10.

However on my Windows I have to access it through its IP address whereas Linux finds it just fine. If I’m reading things correctly that’s just Samba needing to catch up with the newest smb protocol and I’m fine with just using the IP address. Or it could be because haven’t setup a local DNS server yet so right now I’m just using the hosts file… it’s good enough for my purposes for now.

However, Windows 10 categorizes network devices into sections like Computers, Media devices, Multimedia devices and so on. Is there a setting in Samba to tell Windows what type of device it is? In my case I’m just serving up video and it would be nice to set the type to Media device or Multimedia device.

2

You can use WS-Discovery to advertise samba shares. Install wsdd…
https://software.opensuse.org/search?utf8=✓&baseproject=ALL&q=wsdd

Also explained here

Once installed, do

systemctl enable wsdd

systemctl start wsdd

The Windows 10 host should then be able to discover the share(s).

3

To my best knowledge Windows 10 is using WS-Discovery protocol for network browsing and it is not supported by SAMBA. There is five years old SAMBA bug with proposed patch without any progress indication: 11473 – Contribution: WSD and LLMNR support

There is also standalone implementation of WSD daemon: wsdd/src/wsdd.py at master · christgau/wsdd · GitHub From readme and quick source browsing it is using hardcoded host type Computer, but it could be a start. If it works for you, you can discuss with author option to announce different device type.

May be there are other implementations as well.

4

Does it actually advertise shares? For all I can tell it advertises host and clients then enumerate shares on host using normal SMB protocol. I may be wrong, but I do not see where wsdd enumerates SAMBA shares on local host.

5

Yes, technically it is the samba host, but that is sufficient for the Windows file explorer to enumerate the host (in a similar way that NetBIOS was previously used previously), and access the shares from there (with the requisite credentials of course).

6

Awesome and thanks.

7

This is a bonus about being able to setup wsdd for Windows 10 discovery and thanks for that information but my original question was actually about being able to specify the device type to Windows such as multimedia device, computer, media device etc.

I presume that’s a configuration feature of WS-Discovery?

8

No, it’s intended to allow other hosts to discover the samba host.

I know Windows can discover DLNA media devices…perhaps worth investigating setting up a media server (MiniDLNA) or similar…