Please add WS-Discovery ( WSD ) support for Windows Samba server discovery.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Ref. for windows dropping SMB1:
* https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Storage-at-Microsoft/Stop-using-SMB1/ba-p/425858

Good info on how Samba was affected by this:
* https://superuser.com/questions/1322497/did-windows-10-april-update-break-network-discovery-and-samba-support?rq=1

From Samba's FAQ, it looks like there has been some work upstream at supporting WSD internally, and there is a patch proposed (the master.zip file's README.md references this work):
* https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/FAQ
* https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11473

Of note, this review comment:

"""
- Is WSD only based on HTTP (via TCP)?
  If so would it make sense to reuse some of source4/web_server/
  and implement WSD in python?
  Just as an idea, using xml in C always scares me..
"""

It would probably be a good idea to post a mention of this wsdd-master to the Samba bug report. They may already be aware of this work, but if not would be helpful to tell them; I don't know if it'd be appropriate for what they need, but worst case they may have useful advice/feedback.

Meanwhile, for implementing this particular fix in-distro, it may be cleanest to package wsdd as its own discrete source package, and have Samba depend on it as Recommends. While it is just a single python script, it has several python dependencies, which may be easier to manage separately from samba itself, and the project appears to be actively maintained at present (https://github.com/christgau/wsdd/) so we may expect to see updates to the script.

wsdd is covered under the MIT License, so since this issue likely affects Debian as well, it may be worth submitting the package to Debian. The issue this fixes seems to be fairly widespread so there could be broad interest in this solution.

This came up in our "untouched in 180 days" bug triage. I found https://github.com/christgau/wsdd/issues/19 where someone apparently packaged this, but not conforming to the debian policy (as stated by the author), and no ITP bug yet. I found a debian WNPP bug (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=930339), but for a C version of this service (https://github.com/kochinc/wsdd2), and this was taken from a Netgear NAS according to the README file. It also has received no further commits for more than a year.

Maybe include an ubuntu package and make it dependent on samba?
It's been a while, why not do something easy for the user?

Ideally, this package should be included in Debian first, and then we sync it from there. In general, we include Ubuntu-only package if Debian does not agree in including it and we have a compelling reason to do it. If this package is included in Debian we could have more eyes on it and it would reduce the maintenance burden for us in Ubuntu.

I'd recommend to file a ITP (Intent To Package) or RFP (Request For Package) bug in Debian and see what the samba maintainers there will have to say. If you do that, please add a link to the Debian bug here so we can track it as well.

Hi!

I am the Debian Developer who has just uploaded wsdd 0.7.0 to Debian Sid unstable.

Salsa package git repo is https://salsa.debian.org/grantma/wsdd

Also uploaded Debian Bullseye backports.

Please feel free to pull into latest Ubuntu :-) even 22.04! Should be good to go.

I tested this on Ubuntu 20.04 and Mint 20 and it works as advertised. I don't see a path to 22.04 yet but it may be too soon.

I hope there is time to include it into the Ubuntu 22.04 release as either a dependency of the samba package itself or at least as an available separate install within the main Ubuntu repository.

I am very very grateful for your work here. You have made my support job a whole lot easier.

> I tested this on Ubuntu 20.04 and Mint 20 and it works as advertised. I don't see a path to 22.04 yet but it may be too soon.

That's good to hear the new package addresses your need.

wsdd is currently in Debian New for manual review. We won't be able to sync it into Ubuntu until that process is finished; if it finishes sufficiently prior to the Feature Freeze for 22.04 (in a few weeks) there might be a chance to import the package into universe.

However, to make this a dependency for Samba would require wsdd be in main, which requires also going through Ubuntu's security review process - aka Main Inclusion Review (MIR) - which is currently pretty heavily backlogged.

So you're probably right that time may be too short for including this in focal/main. 22.10 may be a more realistic objective for inclusion with Samba.

Thanks again for pushing this feature and tackling the testing. Let's see how things develop in Debian.

I've uploaded the package to a PPA, to verify it builds in the LP env:

  https://launchpad.net/~bryce/+archive/ubuntu/wsdd

Since my last post I starting testing Ubuntu 22.04 and noticed there is a package wsdd2. https://packages.ubuntu.com/jammy/net/wsdd2

It's in jammy/universe. I installed it and I can connect to it from Win11 as WSD.

So now I'm confused. Which one is which. They are not the same package but do the same thing - at least from the user's viewpoint.

It will be confusing to have both, right?

This is perhaps outside the responsibility of this venue to answer but I did an apt update on Ubuntu 22.04 today and there are now two wsdd packages:

wsdd2: 1.8.6+dfsg-3
wsdd: 2:0.7.0-1

In the limited tests I have done they both work. I do not know what would happen if both of them were installed at the same time which leads to my question.

Does anyone have any insight on which one is to be used. Are they for different purposes? Development of the wsdd version seems to be more active than the other which makes me inclined to use that one.

Hello,

wsdd comes from https://github.com/christgau/wsdd -> which is a Python implementation:
"wsdd implements a Web Service Discovery host daemon. This enables (Samba) hosts, like your local NAS device, to be found by Web Service Discovery Clients like Windows."

Whereas, wsdd2 comes from https://github.com/Netgear/wsdd2 -> which is a C implementation:
"The primary purpose of this project is to enable WSD on Samba servers so that network shares hosted on a Unix box can appear in Windows File Explorer / Network."

You can choose either to get your work done. As far as I can tell, one doesn't depend on the other so nothing will be broken, really. So go ahead with wsdd as you feel more confident with that. :)

wsdd is now in Ubuntu Jammy: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wsdd

I haven't tested the integration points, though, but it's a start.

Oh, sorry, a previous comment stated that already.

What are the next steps here? Are people willing to try to promote wsdd to main?

Hi Lucas (and everyone else above) the steps here are actually to summarize what was done and what could be done.

Done
- wsdd is packaged
- wsdd2 is packaged
- both are available in jammy and later (from universe)
- Morbius tried them already and they seemed to work so far

Future:
- we could consider moving wsdd or wsdd2 to main to further integrate or recommend it; This is on our candidate list, but at least this cycle it didn't make the cut.

The bug "provide wsdd" is actually resolved - there is no "do WSD" option of samba to enable.
And upstream (in the referenced bug) said that won't happen.

So this bug is actually done in wsdd/wsdd2 and "Won't Fix" in Samba.
Adapting the bug state ...

I've taken a note at our main promotion candidates that this bug is related to the wsdd case.