Shared drives not appearing in sidebar / network

[Mrpower]

I've encountered a somewhat strange problem with some MacBook Airs running OSX 10.13. Now and again the Shared servers stop appearing in sidebar / network. Both AFP and SMB shared server just disappear. Sometimes a restart solves the problem, but not always.

 

One solution I found on stack exchange, was to go to ~/Library/Preferences and find the com.apple.sidebarlist.plist file and edit it in Xcode. Today a Mac BookAir lost the shared server, so I went looking for the .plist and it was missing; not in any Library folder or in any Preference folder.

After a lot of internet searching, I finally made an automation in automator which displays the shared servers in a nice pop-up window.

Weirdly the pop-up window displays the shared servers; the Mac can see the servers on the network, but will not display them in the sidebar, that's very weird, a real head scratcher.

Anyone else experienced this?