I nmap-scanned my main PC (with Plasma) and it unexpectedly detected:
1716/tcp open tcpwrapped
When doing sudo lsof -i tcp:1716, it said;
kdeconnec 2477 a 12u IPv6 53295 0t0 TCP *:1716 (LISTEN)
I don’t know why it’s cut off like that, but I assume that it must mean “kdeconnect”, which I have neither consciously installed nor enabled.
I’m trying to figure out how to disable this unwanted server without any luck. ChatGPT tells me nonsense and online I find old discussions about this without any resolution.
Why is this “KDE Connect” running some kind of server by default? And why is it so difficult to make it stop? I’d rather not simply uninstall kdeconnect because it might bring things down with it or later re-install it automatically.
I didn’t expect anything on Linux to “listen” like this by default. I don’t know if it only does it for LAN connections, and this computer is behind a NAT router anyway, but it freaks me out that this would ever be done by default on Linux.
(I’m still on Plasma 5 on Debian 12. I made a serious effort to switch to Fedora before I realized that Firefox ESR isn’t available there, only the oddly crippled “standard” Firefox, which means it wouldn’t be possible to run my personal-use-only, self-developed, not-signed-by-Mozilla Firefox extensions.)
How is Kdeconnect supposed to work without some sort of service?
It is a very popular KDE tool, and for quite a long time. Most distros include it as a default part of their Plasma desktop setups, even minimal ones, but you should be able to uninstall kdeconnect if you don’t want it.
Yes, you can use Firefox ESR in Fedora.
You would just need to download and manually run it. I believe that this, like their self-contained normal Firefox download, can self-update.
It can take a very small amount of work to create a menu entry, etc, but using FF ESR is far from impossible.
Well, I’ve now run sudo apt remove kdeconnect, yet nmap still reports that it’s listening on the same port and ps aux | grep kdeconnect says /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexec/kdeconnectd is running. I haven’t rebooted yet but wouldn’t removing software also shut down any running instances? Anyway, I’m going to assume that it won’t show up the next boot.
But isn’t this a very odd way of doing things? Why not simply have a config option somewhere to turn this off? Why must it either be uninstalled entirely or installed and actively running a network service to the world/LAN? It should also ask before it ever turns itself on in the first place, for example in the initial “welcome screen” when first installing Plasma. I could have gone years without realizing that I had this security hole waiting to happen. I ran nmap just to verify that I have nothing unexpected running and didn’t expect any results beyond nginx.
It seems to be almost entirely for using “your phone”, which I don’t have nor want. No matter how popular it might be, having this software run a server by default just seems very strange.
I was under the impression that if you download a package like that manually, you are forever forced to manually repeat this process every time there is an update (and you won’t know when that is). If it auto-updates on its own, that would be a first in my experience. My current Firefox ESR on Debian certainly doesn’t auto-update by itself; its part of the APT system (via Discover in Plasma).
Firefox’s self-contained tarballs have their own self-update mechanism. I am almost 100 percent positive that their self-contained ESR tarball does as well. I haven’t looked.
(The kdeconnect process disappeared after the next reboot, as expect. I still find it creepy that something was listening on the network by default, though.)
In other words, while it appears to have some kind of auto-updater built in (which I’ve never noticed on Debian – maybe because the APT package has disabled it?), something is obviously preventing it from updating when installed in this manual manner, and instead it’s telling me to go to a download page and perform manual steps. So while you were right about Firefox having some sort of auto-updater mechanism, it nevertheless doesn’t work for unknown reasons.
This is what that settings page shows for me. Very frustrating. Can’t find any mention of this online of course (that’s pretty much a given for any issue I encounter).
I created an account at https://discourse.mozilla.org/ (for this and other Firefox questions) but as soon as I had done so, I got the standard “This is an automated message from Mozilla Discourse to let you know that your account has been temporarily placed on hold as a precautionary measure.” idiocy which translates into “No human will ever actually review or even know about your account/topic”, so my submitted thread will likely never be “published”/seen by anyone.
I’ve come to expect and assume this kind of BS. Usually, you don’t even get to register/log in at all on most sites in the last 10-15 years.
