ctawn Wrote:What a clusterf*ck. If you're running XBMC on a Mac, it should use it's buillt-in Samba client to access other machines. So in theory there shouldn't be a problem going that way, but apparently some are having those problems anyway. With the Lion upgrade, the reverse is the problem: serving media over Samba to XBMC running on another machine. That's what clearly won't work without installing another build of Samba not provided by Apple.
Again, it would be nice if some XBMC devs were able to say they could build in the client that would communicate with whatever custom flavor of samba Apple is now providing with Lion.
A few things. Samba is not SMB. Samba is a 3rd party implementation of SMB. In other words, Samba is the generic brand for SMB. Minor detail, but it will help when talking about the issue and when troubleshooting.
SMB is only made by Microsoft, and they don't share all the details on it. Anyone wanting to make SMB work on a non Microsoft product has to hack it in. That's what Samba or Apple's solution is.
There is SMB 1.0 and SMB 2.0. On Windows you can use either 1.0 or 2.0, so there's never been a problem using SMB between a Mac and a Windows OS. The old Samba that Apple used in 10.6 and lower supported SMB 1.0. The new SMB-implemnation that Apple is making only does SMB 2.0. XBMC, using Samba libraries, can only do 1.0 (or at least is not fully within spec to 2.0).
Apple provides SMB support so Macs can share files with Windows. In 10.6 (using SMB 1.0) or 10.7 (using SMB 2.0) this will always work (Windows uses both). To the end user using SMB for Windows-Mac sharing, nothing has changed. To the majority of the users nothing is broken.
XBMC devs have commented on the SMB/Samba client within XBMC. It uses a standard Samba library and isn't anything really custom to XBMC. Work getting SMB 2.0 to work with Samba is being done, and when the Samba people are finished then XBMC will gain those abilities. Just remember that Samba is a different project with different people working on it. There's not much XBMC devs can do unless they want to build something from scratch, and that would take longer.
Quote:If you're running XBMC on a Mac, it should use it's buillt-in Samba client to access other machines. So in theory there shouldn't be a problem going that way, but apparently some are having those problems anyway.
Regarding this specifically: No. If you are sharing from a Mac 10.7 machine to another Mac using SMB you can get it to work, but you can't use SMB within XBMC. What you do is you mount the SMB share in Mac OS X in the finder so it looks like a local disk. Then in XBMC you say "look at this local disk". The SMB/Samba client within XBMC won't auto detect the OS's client. If you select SMB from within XBMC it will
always use XBMC's client.