Wsdd
Maintainer
Version
Description
wsdd implements a Web Service Discovery host daemon. This enables (Samba) hosts, like your local server device, to be found by Web Service Discovery Clients like Windows.
It also implements the client side of the discovery protocol which allows to search for Windows machines and other devices implementing WSD. This mode of operation is called discovery mode.
Purpose
Since NetBIOS discovery is not supported by Windows anymore, wsdd makes hosts to appear in Windows again using the Web Service Discovery method. This is beneficial for devices running Samba, like NAS or file sharing servers on your local network. The discovery mode searches for other WSD servers in the local subnet.
Background
With Windows 10 version 1511, support for SMBv1 and thus NetBIOS device discovery was disabled by default. Depending on the actual edition, later versions of Windows starting from version 1709 ("Fall Creators Update") do not allow the installation of the SMBv1 client anymore. This causes hosts running Samba not to be listed in the Explorer's "Network (Neighborhood)" views. While there is no connectivity problem and Samba will still run fine, users might want to have their Samba hosts to be listed by Windows automatically.
You may ask: What about Samba itself, shouldn't this functionality be included in Samba!? Yes, maybe. However, using Samba as file sharing service is still possible even if the host running Samba is not listed in the Network Neighborhood. You can still connect using the host name (given that name resolution works) or IP address. So you can have network drives and use shared folders as well. In addition, there is a patch lurking around in the Samba bug tracker since 2015. So it may happen that this feature gets integrated into Samba at some time in the future.