No SMB1 to Share Devices
As it recently came up I thought I should perhaps post this more publicly… As many of you will know SMB1, the super ancient protocol for windows shares, shouldn’t be used anymore. It’s been deprecated since like Windows Vista and was eventually also disabled by default in both Windows 10 and Samba. As a result you are not able to find servers that do not support either DNS-SD aka Bonjour aka Avahi, or WS-Discovery. But there’s an additional problem! Many devices (e.g. NAS) produced since the release of Vista could support newer versions of SMB but for not entirely obvious reasons do not have support for WS-Discovery-based … discovery. So, you could totally find and use a device without having to resort to SMB1 if you know its IP address. But who wants to remember IP addresses. Instead you can just have another device on the network play discovery proxy! One of the many ARM boards out there, like a rapsberrypi, would do the trick. To publish a device over DNS-SD (for Linux & OS X) you’ll first want to map its IP address to a local hostname and then publish a service on that hostname. avahi-publish -a blackbox.local 192.168.100.16 avahi-publish -s -H blackbox.local SMB_ON_BLACKBOX _smb._tcp 445 If you also want to publish for windows 10 systems you’ll additionally want to run wsdd wsdd.py -v -n BLACKBOX Do note that BLACKBOX in this case can be a netbios, or LLMNR, or DNS-SD name (Windows 10 does support name resolution via DNS-SD these days). Unfortunate caveat of wsdd is that if you want to publish multiple devices you’ll need to set up a bridge and put the different wsdd instances on different interfaces.