I am trying to set up KDE Connect between a machine running Linux Mint and my Android-device. It does not show up, and it turns out I don’t receive any response if I ping it, and I have the same issue trying to ping the machine from my Android device (from Termux). I’ve tried two different Android devices, but no luck.
This is not an issue with two other machines I have. Both have KDE Connect setup and I can ping the phone just fine, and I can also ping from the phone. They’re all connected to the same VLAN. I can also ping from this machine to the other machines. ufw is disabled.
What could be the issue here?
EDIT: Connection established suddenly after installing and running iptraf.
I fixed this on my EndeavourOS machine by enabling kdeconnect in the firewall settings.
if you decide to turn ufw back on:
sudo ufw allow 1714:1764/udp
sudo ufw allow 1714:1764/tcp
Related, but just hanging this on here. As the default (as installed) security of distributions has improved, so have the amount of headaches when trying to use tools like this increased. For decades, when I’ve had issues like this is not been because of a LAN firewall issue, and so now my first thought is never been, “I should check the firewall,” when it should.
Sadly, firewall info is almost always locked down so that apps can’t even check by themselves and provide helpful hints to users.
Anyway, it’s been a hard lesson for me to learn, for some reason. I need to practice my mantra: it’s always the firewall.
With your EDIT my first thought was “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”.
Hehe yeah, this persisted over several days and through several reboots and on two different phones. No clue what changed as I understood iptraf to simply help me diagnose. But a run directly before and after running iptraf for the first time had different results, and now I am reproducing it every time.
Which version of KDEConnect do you run in Linux Mint? Seems like they package an old version from what I gather when searching for answers:
https://discuss.kde.org/t/can-not-pair-android-phone-and-linux-mint-21-1-desktop-with-kde-connect/1455
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1b5fvay/how_do_users_of_mint_or_other_debianbased_distros/
Are your other machines running distros with more up to date repositories?
I’ll look closer into this when I’m back at the computer in about an hour. In the post on the KDE forum, they seem to get an error complaining about the version though, while in my case they don’t show up at all when I attempt to pair. I’ve checked the things listed on the KDE Connect wiki, but those checks pass.
EDIT: UDP discovery was turned off on my phone, and turning it on allowed connection. All is good now!
Install iptraf on the machine that’s being troublesome, to see if the ping traffic even registers on the interface
Very strange - I just installed it, and as soon as I ran it, the output in Termux went from “Destionation Host Unreachable” to responses from my machine. Outbound pings from my machine also now get a response. I assume this was only supposed to help diagnose and not fix the issue? :p
KDE Connect is still acting up though, but at least they can talk to each other now! Thanks :)
