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KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

(community.kde.org)
475 points snthd | 1 comments | 12 Oct 25 12:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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karmakaze ◴[12 Oct 25 17:09 UTC] No.45559827[source]▶
I was wondering what "the network" here means:

> To achieve this, KDE Connect:

    implements a secure communication protocol over the network, and allows any developer to create plugins on top of it.
    Has a component that you install on your desktop.
    Has a KDE Connect client app you run on your phone.
Looking further it is only for the local network (with ways to extend it e.g. VPNs).
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creatonez ◴[13 Oct 25 01:56 UTC] No.45563974[source]▶
It has bluetooth support now as well
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m463 ◴[13 Oct 25 22:08 UTC] No.45573849[source]▶
it also talks about using a VPN and what ports to open in a firewall.

I don't know how it handles the harder part, the "device on internet" talks to "device in my house"

most phones and apps use this "harder part" to interpose their corporate server for more than TURN/STUN and continue to "collect all the data" or "insert a subscription"

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Oxodao ◴[14 Oct 25 10:00 UTC] No.45578146[source]▶
Did you get this to work with wireguard though?

As long as my phone is connected to wireguard KDEConnect does NOT see any other computer, apparently because it wont forward ICMP broadcast according to the internet.

I would really like to have a solution to this issue but since its baked in WG i don't think this is possible

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1. jeroenhd ◴[21 Oct 25 11:07 UTC] No.45654475[source]▶
WireGuard doesn't do any forwarding out of the box, you need to set up your iptables/nftables to get all of that working. If you follow the WG quick-start guides, they often work by masquerading traffic, making VPN clients act the same way a bunch of computers behind a NAT router would.

You'll need to set up all other kinds of routing as well for cross-network discovery to work. WireGuard doesn't do broadcasting in general (it's a point-to-point protocol after all) so you'll need to wrap broadcasting protocols manually.

Other VPNs go more low-level (at least in TAP mode), mirroring an ethernet network with all the broadcasting and low-level protocols you can think of. In theory you could do that in WireGuard (running L2TP over a WireGuard link) but many phones won't support that, and it'd probably be just as easy to set up an OpenVPN/IPSec+L2TP VPN in that case.

I'm not sure if it's a good idea, though. I imagine most people wouldn't want a printer publishing its mDNS hostname to wake the 5G radio on their phone, or the battery level of their laptop in the case of KDE connect.