Dolphin > Network > Shared Folders (SMB) not populating

[flexmcmurphy]

This was working until today.

When I open Dolphin File Manager and click Network on the left menu then click on Shared Folders (SMB) normally the other machines on my LAN appear and I can click in to them to browse Samba shares.

But today that stopped working? It says “Loading…” then “No Shared Folders found”.

Just the automatic behavior has stopped working.
If I type this in to the dolphin address bar it works fine:
smb://ubuntu@192.168.1.34/ubuntu/

Update:

Above I was connected to a public wifi network over a Wireguard VPN with this client profile:

[Interface]
Address = 10.7.0.2/24, fddd:2c4:2c4:2c4::2/64
DNS = 1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1
PrivateKey = redacted
MTU = 1280
PostUp = sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1
PostDown = sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=0

[Peer]
PublicKey = redacted
PresharedKey = redacted
AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0, ::/0
Endpoint = freePublicDomainName:443
PersistentKeepalive = 20

I have used that set up many times up until yesterday it was working.

But when I am back in my home LAN and using my local LAN wifi, no VPN… it works.

Once again when I connect using the above client profile VPN connection over a 4G hotspot and click in to Dolphin File Manager > Network > Shared Folders (SMB) > it does NOT work… It says “Loading…” then “No Shared Folders found”.

I guess my question is:
Does Dolphin network discovery work over a VPN like Wireguard? Maybe I was imagining all along that it was because I already had tabs open in Dolphin I just kept using?

I spent alot of time asking Google Gemini and ChatGPT and the later says: “WireGuard is Layer 3 only; it cannot forward broadcast/multicast across the tunnel. This explains why Dolphin discovery fails over VPN but direct SMB connections work.” Is that correct?

[jofi]

@flexmcmurphy

If I type this in to the dolphin address bar it works fine:
smb://ubuntu@192.168.1.34/ubuntu/

If giving the IP directly works it looks like a problem with mDNS.

@flexmcmurphy

“WireGuard is Layer 3 only; it cannot forward broadcast/multicast across the tunnel. This explains why Dolphin discovery fails over VPN but direct SMB connections work.” Is that correct?

Yes as you noticed already

@flexmcmurphy

Maybe I was imagining all along that it was because I already had tabs open in Dolphin I just kept using?

if the lookup was done already and cached by dolphin you got the impression everything worked fine.

All i can add is that i have already trouble sometimes without using different networks or vpn. Just yesterday i had to restart

systemctl restart avahi-daemon

on the machine where my Samba shares run, because it advertised itself as hostname-3.local whereas dolphin found it as hostname-2.local but clicking on it led to a “connection was canceled” error. After restarting the avahi-daemon, dolphin found the share under hostname.local as it was supposed to work right from the beginning (well i had to kill and restart dolphin a few times too and the hostnames of all my machines are unique of course)