[elkiwna]

Loaded a PC with unbuntu xbmc for the first time. Everything went well. I then Upgraded unbuntu and then updated xbmc.

I connected it to a video share on my media server (windows) and everything worked great.

After a reboot, I couldn't connect to the share. it was giving me an error about the SMB share being unavailable. So i went poking around and saw under settings/service there is an option to put in a WINS server for SMB. so I put in my router ip (192.168.1.1) and it prompted me to restart xbmc. The share came back no problem.

The following night i turned it on again only to find the exact same issue. Simply editing the WINS entry and then editing it back, followed by a restart of xbmc fixed the issue again.

I've looked around, and i haven't seen much in the way of threads. Has anybody run into this?

[mrpg]

Might not be the prettiest solution,

but i would simply put in an entry in your ubuntus /etc/hosts for your windows machine

i.e something like

192.168.1.xxx windowsmachinename

That should sort it out.

Br
Patric

[elkiwna]

Thanks for the suggestion. i come from a primarily windows work background, and i hadn't thought of a host entry file. not a bad idea. I did more digging after and found a lot more information. i guess this is a fairly prevalent problem. From what i can tell it has more to do with the way Windows doles out control over SMB shares (ie one machine is a master) and it changes regularly. Apparently it can take a long time to resolve too. couple that with the fact that i just reloaded both my windows machines plus the xbmc machine. might have been a combination of factors. I fire it up last night and everything worked fine.

I also read on the xbmc wiki that i should uninstall windows live sign on as well, so ill try that too.