Ubuntu 18.04 Update

Some things I've found regarding some of the issues.  On the network, it seems that r8168 is broken in Ubuntu 18.04.  Check the issues here and here.  I'll investigate solutions for this.

This was a router issue with my MAC Address filters.  Silly me banned my own laptop from using the router.

On the SMB issue, I managed to connect using cifs.  Here's my command-line mount:

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=guest,guest,vers=1.0 //router_ip/share /home/user/mountpoint

At least I am now able to connect and transfer stuff to the router's external drive.  I had similar issues with Linux Mint Rebecca (17.1) and the solution was to roll back to version I had back in 2016 (4.3.9).