Following the WannaCry Ransomeware attack in 2017, Windows stopped supporting the SMB1 protocol – and along with it Windows hosts’ previous primary broadcast discovery mechanism. Since then, Linux hosts have mostly gone dark when it comes to sharing discoverable network shares with Windows network clients. However, Windows supports the Web Service Discovery (WSD) protocol. Ubuntu has added support for WSDD – and now you can easily do the same for any Linux distribution that supports Python.

For the past few weeks I’ve been battling to get my Linux instances to access file shares on my Windows 10 instances over the network. Whether it was Ubuntu, Fedora, or RedHat, the recent upgrades to Windows 10 left my Windows shares inaccessible via Samba. Troubleshooting was difficult as I had nothing to go on exception really ambiguous messages via the syslog (“Failed to mount Windows share: Connection timed out”). After some trial and error it all came down to an undocumented change in how Windows 10 supports the SMB protocol.