MP, network shares & Kerboros

[flexi]

Hi

all my music, pictures and movies are stored on my "server". MP is installed on a dedicated computer.

I have mapped different permanent network-shares on the MP computer. So far so good.

The problem is, that MP can not access all these shares after a reboot. I always have to minimize MP to tray, open Windows Explorer, the browse once to each network-share, close Windows Explorer then I can switch back to MP and also have access to the shares from within MP.

This behavior is quite annoying. I would be very glad if someone has a workaround for this.

I guess that MP has some problems with Windows authentication mechanisms or protocols (Kerboros).

Any suggestions? I am sure, I am not the only one here storing the content on a server and accessing it via network-shares. So someone out there should at least be able to confirm this problem.

Thank you very much!

Flexi

[flexi]

A possible workaround is to create a link to the networkshare and put this link into the startup folder.

This however is not a very good workaround since it seems not to work all the time. I will further investigate why.

[ashopedies]

i wrote a batch file to connect the shared volumes. the batch file is in the startup folder.

here an example:
@echo off
net use z: \\192.168.178.20\movies /USER:username password
end

[flexi]

@ashopedies

I like your solution better than mine! Thank you very much! Is it working all the time?
What happens after hibernate or standby. Here you should have the same problem as I so with mine, since after resuming from standby hibernate, these batch-file is not executed.

[ashopedies]

my networkshares are all available after wake up from hibernate.

[samundsen]

A solution that works great for me 100% of the time is to not used mapped drives, but instead reference the shares directly in MediaPortal setup, ie. \\mediaserver\music

[gxtracker]

Originally Posted by samundsen

A solution that works great for me 100% of the time is to not used mapped drives, but instead reference the shares directly in MediaPortal setup, ie. \\mediaserver\music

Bingo. I was just going to recommend that but you beat me to it.

using UNC is much more flexable and effective then mapping a network drive. Plus if you are using the UNC to connect to the machine, you dont even have to map the network drive to your machine.

[flexi]

referencing the shares directly works great.

However there are some points I do not like about it:

1) One has to use the same user account & passwords on both computers
Please correct me if I am wrong here.

2) It is not possible to control access rights e.g. read only access. I generally do not like the idea of having MP (or any other piece of software) to have write capabilities on my media server since I do not have the possibility to backup a 1TB RAID 5 (at least not a cheap one). So if some nasty bug messes around with my content it will be gone forever.

3) Since paths change when going from mapped drives to direct share access, all the thumbs have to be recreated. The movie db has to be rebuilt from scratch.
If there are possibilities to overcome this, please let me know. I have about 30GB of pictures and over 400 movies on my media server. Rebuilding thumbs and the movie db is very time consuming.

[onkl]

On 1 and 2:If you start woking with advanced sharing instead of simple sharing, you could create a new user on your server with credentials equal to the standard user on your HTPC and with only read rights. A simple google search will prolly help you out, but don't hesitate to ask. (Do consider user groups in this case by the way)

[flexi]

@onkl

Thank you for the tip. I will have a look at that.