Authentication Information for connecting to USB drive attached to HD200 with Samba

[petely]

I have a HD200 running 20081230 0 and have a USB harddrive plugged into the HD200's USB port. I can browse to the HD200's IP address via CIFS and then see my drive shared at which point I am prompted to enter credentials. After canceling the prompts, it allows me to browse to the drive but albeit in read only mode. I am looking to copy files directly to the device to prevent network jitters from interfering with playback. What credentials should be provided?

Thanks

[petely]

It appears that when credentials are not supplied, your logged into SMB via root albeit locked down a bit.

FYI: All groups and users seem to have only browse and read privledges.

[petely]

I figured out that I can telnet into the device and login as root without a password however I cannot figure out how to view files. Tried the usual type, vi, nano, etc commands but seems this version of uLinux is quite stripped down. Was hoping to view the smb.config file for clues.

[petely]

An update:

Found some ways to actually display whats in the in the smb.conf. Seems it maintains a copy in /tmp

Notice that readonly is off however the group or user permissions seems to be overriding.

MEDIASHIZ[/]# cd /tmp
MEDIASHIZ[/tmp]# cat smb.conf
[global]
guest account = root
security = share
netbios name = MEDIASHIZ
server string = MEDIASHIZ
workgroup = MSHOME
[ST340063 3AS (373 GB)]
read only = No
force user = root
force group = root
guest ok = yes
comment = ST340063 3AS (373 GB)
path = /tmp/external/ST340063 3AS (373 GB)

[petely]

It appears that my later suspicions were correct. My first attempt was with a drive formatted with NTFS. I then low level wiped the MBR then formated to ext2. Drive was not even detected. I then formatted to FAT32 (note this is with a 400GB drive) and the drive is detected and the share is writable. I am assuming the NTFS driver that the HD200 is using does not support write capability instead of the NTFS-3G driver that does support writes.

My only concern is the capacity that the FAT32 driver can access (won't mention journaling at the moment). I suppose we will find out.

[petely]

Now after trying to copy to the HDD attached to the HD200 via the share of the FAT32 HDD, I consistently get Error 64 which is "The specified network name is no longer available" This only occurs on files that are larger than a few kb.

This is indicative of a bottle neck which is most likely occurring on the HD200 rather than on the 100Mbps full duplex network between source and destination.

[petely]

As I continue to try to troubleshoot, I noticed this weird issue. After a fresh reboot, the drive is initially writable as seen by the mount output below.


/dev/sda1 on /tmp/external/ST340063 3AS (373 GB) type vfat (rw,noatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,utf8)

After starting a file copy, the drive appears to remount this time in Read Only (RO) mode

/dev/sda1 on /tmp/external/ST340063 3AS (373 GB) type vfat (ro,noatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,utf8)


What the heck is going on here. I cannot manually mount it as it as the device is always busy. I can force unmount it (umount -l) but it will not be mountable after that (Device or resource is busy).

It seems that smbd server might still be a new feature to the HD200 so some of the bugs might not have been worked out but hopefully some of this troubleshooting would be of some help.

[petely]

Recently upgraded to the 03162009 beta firmware. Still seeing the same issues with the USB drive being mounted read only. Can someone at least acknowledge this even if they don't have the answer?

[evilpenguin]

Have you submitted a bug report to Sage?

[petely]

Just found this thread which seems to have received a little more notice.

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=39166

Next steps: try EXT3 as the filesystem instead of NTFS or FAT32

[petely]

Evilpenguin: No not yet. Thanks for the response. I figured I would give the community time to respond since it seems many SageTV developers lurked about the forums.

If I can get R/W access with EXT3, that would be an acceptable, albeit, not ideal solution. At that point I would likely file an enhancement request for adding NTFS-3G support to the HD200.

[petely]

Confirmed that formatting as ext3 does indeed perform as expected with RW access.

Here is the proof from the mount output:

/dev/sda1 on /tmp/external/ST340063 3AS              (373 GB) type ext3 (rw,noat
ime,errors=continue,data=ordered)

Thanks everyone