[LIVE] Samba problems solved, mabye?
#1
I run a Ubuntu desktop with samba shares, which XBMCLive points at to play files. For years I've had intermittent issues where connecting to the shares works one day, and not the next.

About a year ago I finally got sick of it and edited my sources.xml and replaced the computer's name with it's IP address. This works reliably, except about every 3 months when the DHCP server decides to give my desktop a new IP. This was a decent workaround, only requiring intervention a few times a year.

I believe I've finally found the root cause here, wanted to see if anyone else has experience with it, or can confirm my suspicions. First, I added the SMB sources through the XBMC gui. This produced a source inside sources.xml that looked sort of like this:
smb://username:password@COMPUTERNAME/share
Like I mentioned above, this worked about 60% of the time. The other 40% it failed to find the share and I had to reboot my XBMC box and re-try, sometimes a couple of times.
After hacking away on an unrelated area of XBMC code, I found that it suffers from the same issue a lot of Windows derived products do - in many situations XBMC is not case sensitive. I've found a number of areas where file and directory names strings are UPPER'd and then compared. This gave me an idea:
My Ubuntu machine is not called "COMPUTERNAME", it's called "computername". I manually changed the sources.xml to use the proper case - and in a few weeks of testing I haven't had an issue!

So, in summary:
- Entering new shares via the XBMC interface creates all upper case entries in sources.xml
- Samba on Ubuntu (at least the way I have it configured) seems to be erratically particular about the case of the computer name.

My guess is that SMB itself (being from MS) is probably case-insensitive, so XBMC is doing the "right thing", and the root of my issue is with Samba. So if anyone is using Samba, and having connection issues with SMB network shares, maybe this will be helpful.

Also, regarding case-sensitivity. Try creating two video files with different contents and naming them foobar.avi and Foobar.avi, then play around with them on XBMC - the chaos this creates is quite confusing. Sometimes the file list shows two files both called "foobar.avi", sometimes it lists them with the correct capitalization. It also tries to "resume" one from the last place you were viewing the other, etc. In general, XBMC is not case-sensitive, hopefully it's moving in that direction though!
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[LIVE] Samba problems solved, mabye?0