[SOLVED] SMB4K and the System Tray

[royleith]

After many Kubuntu releases, I have finally got smb4k working... except.

I need smb4k rather than using Dolphin to access my NAS. That way I can use luckyBackup (a front-end to rsync) to backup my files to the NAS.

Just in case it is of general interest, the fix is to change the SMB protocol in Advanced Mount Settings to

1.0 (Classic CIFS/SMBv1 protocol)

Throughout my days of poking around, I always got the message when closing the smb4k window that it would keep running in the System Tray.

Part of the way through, it stopped doing that. The window closes, but nothing ever appears in the System Tray. The only way to get it running again is to kill the process in KSysGuard or do a reboot. It seems that the quit command closes the window, but does not halt the process or initialise the System Tray icon.

I have tried reinstalling, purging-and-reinstalling and updating the Distribution from 20.04 to 20.10(!), but nothing works. Since the application files have all been updated several times, it must be a config file, but there is nothing obvious in the install list.

I noticed that the smb4k icon does not appear in the Application Launcher, but does appear in the Application Launcher Editor. Just in case, I swapped it for another, but that changed nothing.

Any ideas?

[jglen490]

It sounds like an interesting app, unfortunately I have never used it. Is the doc not of any use?

[royleith]

@jglen490

After having a good poke around random text files I always revert to RTFM. The smb4k manual is very good when everything is working well, but does not deal with this problem.

However, much to my embarrassment, I have solved the problem.

[royleith]

The solution is simply embarrassing. In previous Kubuntu distributions, the smb4k system tray icon appeared in the hidden icon area and it was easy to forget that network shares were still mounted. With the latest 20.04 and 20.10 releases it appears in the unhidden part of the System Tray. This, of course, is what should happen and I never expected that!

I checked with a 'live' flash drive with 20.10 and that made my mistake more obvious. It also showed that the 'Network Neighbourhood' search was not working and I had to revert to manual mounting of shares. It may be because of some Samba setting I have changed or it may just be a result of using a 'live' installation from the flash drive.

I must have ticked the 'do not give system tray warning' tick box at some point.

I have found the settings file, but the only setting that is not in the GUI is 'launch docked in system tray'. I have not found a setting to restore the System Tray warning pop-up. I will just have to remember to check the System Tray. I have chosen the option to unmount personal and others shares on close and I hope that shutting down Kubuntu will also unmount the shares, if I forget.