KDE local file sharing: "Could not connect to host" problem
 

Hi -

I would like to share files between two machines on my local network (LAN, correct?) and I can't get fish, ftp, or ssh to work in KDE's Dolphin nor ssh on the command line.

I'm running Linux Mint 17.1 KDE on two machines in my home. They are both connected to a Linksys WRT-54GL router running the stock firmware. Yes, I've secured the wireless, although, while attempting to get the two machines talking to one another, I've hardwired both to the router via Ethernet cables.

As you can likely tell already, I know next to nothing about networks.

Also, I've disabled the firewalls I setup on both machines so blocked ports would not interfere with my network attempts. CODE: sudo ufw disable.

Connection settings are set to the defaults in KDE system settings.

I opened Kinfocenter > Network Information > Network Interfaces on both machines to determine the IP Address of each. One machine reports: "eth0 192.186.1.101" and the other machine reports "eth0 192.186.1.102".

I opened Dolphin on the machine with the IP Address of 192.186.1.101 and typed in the Location Bar: fish://bob@192.186.1.102 and a red bar appears at the top stating: "Could not connect to host 192.186.1.102." (Note: I use bob as my user name on all of my local machines.)

I get similar results when trying to ftp or ssh.

I have also tried Places > Network > Network where I can see the remote machine's hard drive "elaterite3" listed, but when I double click on it nothing happens. It also show an earth icon that's labeled elaterite3 [f0:de:f1:6b:11:67]. I've tried double clicking that too, but nothing happens. I have also tried to right click on the two icons and select "open in Dolphin" and nothing happens.

Finally, I also have tried the following command in terminal "ssh -X bob@192.168.1.102" and it returns: "ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.102 port 22: Connection refused."

In all instances I have also replaced my user name, "bob," with the drive label "elaterite3" and have had no success.

I'm really stupid about all of this, so if you know what is going on, please provide your solution in a cookbook recipe format. For example, it took me about three hours just to figured out what each machine's IP Address was. Everyone says, "Just type fish://user@xxx.xxx.x.xxx. I had no clue what they meant by xxx.xxx.x.xxx. So please be specific.

Thanks!

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Update: I discovered I need the package openssh-server which wasn't included in my distribution. I installed it and now can ssh into my other machine. However, following various instructions online I still can't copy a file or directory using scp from computer B to computer A.

Why is this so hard? I sure wish someone could suggest why I can't just use fish. Why is the connection refused?

But whatever, I ended up copying 50 gigs of files onto a 4gig thumb drive and finally got the files over to my main computer. :(

Do you have ssh server installed and running on the two machines?

If I remember correctly, Mint comes with ssh client by default, but not with ssh server. In order to accept an ssh connection, a machine must be running ssh server.

ps can you tell whether the ssh daemon is running:

You can check in the Software Center to see whether it's installed.

Hi Frank -

Yes, as I noted in my update I discovered I needed to install openssh-server on both machines, only the client comes with the Mint distro.

I was able to ssh from one machine into the other, but am still unable to copy files back and forth using commands such as: "scp bob@192.186.1.102:/home/bob/Documents/test /home/bob/Documents"

Here's the result of the grep command you wanted run: "1079 ? 00:00:00 sshd"

Thanks for the response.