Can't acces USB Drive over wireless network

So, you have a USB drive plugged into your wireless router, but you can't access it in your file manager over the network.

It may be that your router is using a networking protocol that is now deprecated, and no longer supported by your computer.

It may also be that the manufacturer of your router has not issued a firmware update so the router can use an up-to-date version of the protocol.

If you still want to use your router to access a USB drive, the security risk over a home network seems to be minimal, and there is a way to get your computer to use the old protocol.

If you are using Windows 10, which has dropped support for the old protocol, you should have a look at this guide.

I'm going to be looking at the issue in Thunar on XFCE in Debian Testing (Bullseye). 

I was trying to access the USB drive plugged into my router on a new installation of Debian Bullseye. (Having installed the necessary packages. And this one too, which didn't help, but may be necessary.)

I could do so using the ftp address supplied by the router, but not by using the "Browse Network" option in Thunar, where I could see an icon for the drive but not open it.

I put in the smb address for a folder on the drive and got this error message.

Failed to mount windows share. Software caused connection abort.

After much searching, I found that the reason was the deprecated protocol mentioned above.

The issue is discussed at the Manjaro Linux Forum, and at askubuntu.com, as indeed is the solution, so thanks to users at both of those places.

The solution can be implemented in Thunar by creating the following folder and file:

/etc/samba/smb.conf

And adding the line:

client min protocol = NT1

(Although Thunar uses Samba to access network folders, it does not need Samba to be installed - it's part of the gvfs-smb backend - so unless you have Samba already installed, you have to create the samba folder, which doesn't involve installing Samba and its many dependencies. I can't remember where I read this advice in all the links I looked at, but thanks go to whoever it was that mentioned it - I can't take any credit.)

After logging out and back in, you will be able to open your network drive and access folders and files on it.

Yay!

Browse files on Android from Thunar

If you try to browse an Android device from Thunar in XFCE over Bluetooth, it will try to launch Nautilus, which of course isn't installed in XFCE.

The Arch Linux Wiki has a useful script to allow Thunar to browse files on Android over Bluetooth. The script uses obexftp, which must be installed.

obexftp must also be installed in Android. I've read that some Android devices have the service running, but mine didn't.

Bluetooth File Transfer and ES File Explorer File Manager both install the service.

To be honest, I didn't have much success browsing files. In particular, image files from the phone's camera took a long time to browse, and half way through the folder, Thunar would give the same thumbnail to every file.

But I thought I'd document what I did in case I need to come back to it, or in case somebody else finds it useful.

Create archive from folder in Thunar on XFCE

OK this should be easy as Thunar comes with the thunar-archive-plugin installed on Debian Wheezy, which I'm using, but when you right click on a folder and select the Create archive option, you get a directory menu, and if you select the directory you're already in, the plugin will open the folder you want to archive, instead of creating an archive in the same directory. This seems to be a bug.

Interestingly, in Crunchbang (which uses the same plugin version, but from its own repository) if you do the same thing, the expected result happens: an archive of the folder and contents is created in the same directory. I suppose a patch must have been applied in Crunchbang.

There is an alternative method, which I found on XFCE Docs: add a custom action.

Name: Create tar.gz from folder
Command: tar czvf %n.tar.gz %n
File pattern: *
Appears if selection contains: Directories